The Perfect Foam

Sports

Tonight was one of those nights for me.  One of those nights that I looked forward to all week.  Yes it was only a football game.  Yes in the big picture of the world this game meant absolutely nothing.  But, it was a chance for me to enjoy one of the many pieces comprising my perfect foam.

Watching the Patriots play their games is not only a major outlet for my intense competitiveness; it’s also an opportunity for me to turn off my mind for three plus hours and do nothing but watch.  And of course be verbally engaged, which anyone that has watched a game with me can attest to being quite the experience.

From the Patriots-Bills’ game back in the late 1990s, which ended with a Drew Bledsoe to Ben “Winter” Coates touchdown on the last play of the game and my friend Derek and I out on my front lawn rolling around, hootin and hollorin up a storm, to that first Super Bowl win in 2001.  The Patriots have truly been a release for me, and a way to bond with complete strangers at the nearest bar.

Unlike the fateful day in the fall of 2003, when I watched the Aaron Boone home-run off of Tim Wakefield in a bar in Noosa, a small town in Australia (I had to call Derek from a pay phone in order to have someone to lament to!) alone, I have always found people to watch Patriots’ games with.  Literally a 5 minute walk from my apartment in San Francisco I came across a full on Patriots/Red Sox bar.  All TVs are tuned to the game and the bar filled with New Englanders, the people among whom I feel most at home with.  There is just nothing else like walking into a bar full of people that you mostly don’t know and within an hour bonding with these same people over a football game.

It really is amazing.  As I got my pizza at halftime (you can bring food into the bars here!), I had a feeling that even though the Patriots were down by eleven this would be an exciting game with an exciting finish.  Indeed it was!  I will spare you most of the details, but though they lost, when they tied the game with a touchdown on fourth down, with one second left in the game, the bar absolutely erupted.  And I mean it ERUPTED!

I found myself in a mass of people, jumping up and down, hugging random guys, almost tackling the guy next to me out of joy, screaming incoherently.  Again, this is fairly easy to visualize for those that have watched a game with me!  You won’t find me too much happier about too much else!

Though the Patriots lost in overtime, to the hated Jets of all teams, I found myself not nearly as upset as I would have been in the past.  Maybe it was because Matt Cassel, the backup to the injured Tom Brady, played so well and represents the underdog in all of us, or maybe it was because it was just a fun game to watch.  What I do know is how much damn fun I had jumping up and down with a group of random guys celebrating one play of one football game, representing one of sixteen games I will end up watching this regular season.

I can’t wait for the next game so I can do it all over again.  It just doesn’t get much better.