Instant Counterfeit Hippo Thoughts – Championship Sunday, #NuAIDS Season

King Hippo is on assignment, having been informed that someone did NOT get that thing he sent them. His faithful translator/squire/parole officer Reverend Mayhem is your substitute teacher.]

/Takes a slow, lingering drag off the last cigarette in a pack bought January 8, 2000.

/Puts it out on his forearm.

Ahhhh, there it is. The familiar sweet agony of playoff disappointment. Like re-acquainting with an old girlfriend who always thought you liked it a liiiiitle bit rougher than you actually do. You hated it, but you kind of…miss it.

Sadly, I was actually unable to watch this afternoon’s first tilt between The Aaron Rodgers and the Tom Bradys.  Oh, wait, it was Green Bay versus Tampa Bay- the media coverage made me forget that 94 other players were going to be bleeding, sweating and shortening their lives at Lambeau.

Not having seen it and being utterly unwilling to wade through any recaps describing the Stunning Bravery of Tom Terrific, I can’t give you an authentic sense of the ebb and flow.  Thing seem to have been relatively even until the Packers decided to give some dude named Scotty “Doesn’t Know” Miller a free shot at the endzone right before halftime.

https://youtu.be/7_AKr1BEajA

Aaron Jones fumbled after halftime, leading to another easy score for Team MRSA. Three straight picks by Brady (two by Pro Bowler Jaire Alexander) SHOULD have been enough for Bay of Green to turn the tide, but it wasn’t in the cards. Down by eight with just over two minutes left and facing 4th and Goal from the 8, the Packers decided to kick a field goal to bring them within…uh…still a touchdown. This was not an utterly irrational decision- with the two minute warning and three time out, you could get the ball back on a three-and-out with a lot of time left to…um…do the thing you could try to do right now.

Ok, so it was kind of irrational. Especially when you realize the underlying assumption- that you will get a three-and-out against Brady when he doesn’t care about scoring- is utterly ludicrous.  Brady has thrown many impressive passes in his career, but his meat-and-potatoes was high accuracy move-the-chains stuff- the “vertical running game”. If he’s not trying to get chunk yardage for a score, he’ll just bleed you out. And he did. Green Bay didn’t get another sniff. LaFleur looks like another idiot coach who wasted a good day and spectacular season by Aaron Rodgers. Same as it ever was…

The Bills-Chiefs game…I don’t want to talk about it. The Chiefs won handily.  There were specific points of discussion (the Bills going back to timid-ball by taking field goals instead of pushing for TDs, Josh Allen’s accuracy reverting to 2019, etc.) about where the Bills fell short. But in the end, Kansas City just was a better, faster team than the really good, really fast Bills. I wish it had been prettier, and that Tyreek Hill had suffered a deeply painful career-ending injury. But I can’t argue with the result.

It’s also nice, because I can stop waiting for the inevitable, crushing disappointment. I was already bracing for a two-week buildup to a Super Bowl reliving all four prior defeats and then watching Brady fuck our souls into oblivion on international television once again, this time to the musical accompaniment of The Weeknd.* So now I can continue on my way, knowing that the hammer has fallen, the embers of hope securely ground out beneath it. So that’s nice.  Here’s some music.

*Canadian Commenters: why is it spelled this way? Has centuries of profligate U insertion finally caused a vowel shortage?