As I write this there's about ten minutes left in the Rottenbowl—and I'm watching pool on YouTube (American Rotation, a recently invented new game). Expectations for a well-fought, evenly matched game could almost not have been higher, but Denver picked the wrong occasion to play their worst game of the year by far.
It's almost an insult to Seattle—they didn't get to earn their win over a worthy opponent. A really good Dallas-area high school team might have given the Seahawks a better fight. Shades of the '80s, when blowouts in anticlimactic Superbowls were threatening the popularity of the big game (that's the era that established the popularity of showpiece Superbowl commercials—there was little else about those games that was fun to watch).
Huge letdown, huge disappointment. Denver has been on the losing side for some of the worst blowouts in Superbowl history—Superbowl XXII when my Redskins (it's now more politically correct to call them "The DC NFL team" because of that ever-more-cringeworthy name) beat them 42-10, as well as the most lopsided score ever, two years later, when Joe Montana and the 49ers beat them 55-10 in Superbowl XXIV (still the most points ever scored in a Superbowl). But man, nobody expected that this year. Even by Denver's historically spotty standards, this was baaaaad.
Fun to watch if you're a Seahawks fanatic, but for the rest of us, a great big thudding dud.
Well, you know what they say: "There's always next year."
Mike
ADDENDUM: The above might not be a fair or a very astute interpretation of the game; it merely expresses my feeling of disappointment that we didn't get to watch a better game after all that (in my mind, perfectly justified) buildup.
Sports fans do have to deal with the games they actually get. In fact, that might even be main psychological aspect of sports from a viewer's perspective: learning to reconcile what we hope will happen with what actually does.
I'm still very disappointed. Feels to me like an interesting season fizzled like a firecracker that failed to go off.
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Featured Comments from:
Curt Gerston: "Ah, but here in Seattle: thirty-eight years of frustration...then sixty minutes of sheer delirium."
Mike replies: True dat. I said the same thing after Superbowl XXII. I enjoyed every minute of it.
