How Cruel

Roughly 29:30 minutes into the game between the Lions and the Bears today, God caught us in a rear naked choke and his chorus of angels screamed TAP TAP TAAAAAAAAAAP! And then, the whistle blew, saving us just before we passed out and somehow, someway, we were still alive.

Yes, we were alive but mortally wounded, beaten senseless and left bloody and stupid, gibbering incoherently to ourselves, Hope having fled the building like he just robbed the fucking place. We could have just laid there and died. After all, we were already dead, finished before we even got a chance to live. But for some reason, we kept fighting, kept repeating the word PRIDE over and over and over and over again.

And somehow we weren't dead yet. We took furious punch after furious punch and we were still there. And then we started to move forward, inch by bloody inch. Hope was miles out of town by then, but fuck him. We were doing this for ourselves, for here, for now. Then a Failure Demon dug his way out of hell and tripped Calvin Johnson as he streaked down the sidelines.

There we were again, laying beaten, bloody, utterly exhausted but again we decided to crawl forward. Fuck everyone else. Fuck hope. Fuck the world. It was just us. We were already dead but maybe we could still live for a few brief moments, maybe we could make the world see us before our hearts stopped beating.

We had no offense, no counter. We were being pummeled and all we could do was offer up the occasional limp wristed slap in response. And yet, we were not beaten. Not yet. Dead but not beaten.

And then Lance Briggs' body was possessed by the devil himself and he devoured Shaun Hill's soul. We were just a mass of blood and guts and pride. Finished.

But as we were punched in the face, we looked up and through the blood, through the mess of failure, through a mask of red death, we smiled and we spit a bloody defiant gob in Fate's face and our heart kept beating.

At one point, early in the fourth quarter, the FOX crew flashed a graphic memorializing crew members that had recently passed away. It occurred to me that they should have added the concept of Hope to their memorial. It was gone. We had none. It didn't matter.

It didn't matter because we weren't playing for Hope, weren't staying alive for some glorious future. We were staying alive for the moment. We were staying alive for ourselves because fuck fate, fuck the universe, fuck 50 plus years of losing, fuck 0-16, fuck Matt Millen, fuck Rod Marinelli, fuck yesterday, fuck tomorrow. Today. That was all we had left and by God we were going to live until we died.

And then our neck was broken. Indeed. After somehow staying alive, after refusing to die, fate grabbed us by the throat and squeezed until all the bones in our neck cracked and splintered. There was nothing left but a heart beat and a tiny little voice in our brains saying "You will get up, motherfucker, and you will fight."

Somehow, someway, we did. Somehow, someway, we got to our feet, even though we couldn't feel those feet, couldn't feel our arms or our legs. We couldn't feel anything, but we could feel our pride and we could feel the moment and we weren't dead yet.

And somehow we fought, threw punch after punch after punch and Fate trembled before us and then fell and we laughed and we screamed and we cried and the Rocky music started playing and then something infernal stepped in, something foul, something claiming to be a referee, something claiming to speak for justice, and that wretched beast told us that it never happened, that Fate never fell before us and Fate just smiled and spit in our face and then we were caught in that terrible rear naked choke again and we struggled and we fought and although we were already dead we thought "How cruel." How cruel that it had come to this. How cruel that we had fought for ourselves, finally and without any aspiration other than our own sense of pride, our own desire to live in the moment, to be happy for only a whisper before the lights went out. How cruel. And then, everything faded and the world stopped. But we never tapped. We never tapped.