Ain't No Mountain High Enough

Keep climbing, man. Keep climbing.

I’ll be honest with you – I still haven’t recovered from the Lions game against the Vikings. I’m still shaken by how the first half unfolded but I’m also filled with a sort of unflappable hope, a feeling that no matter what happens the Lions always have a chance to pull it off. That’s a strange feeling for most Lions fans and I think it’s going to take a little while to get used to. It’s going to be tough trying to calibrate that scale between full blown Fear and wild-eyed stupid Hope. There are going to be a lot of ridiculous mood swings, a lot of dramatic pomp and circumstance followed by a lot of wading around, covered in our own shit, howling at the moon like deranged beasts. And a lot of these mood swings are going to take place within the span of one game or one half or one quarter or, hell, one series. They certainly will take place within the span of a single post, so don’t be surprised if one minute I’m sounding the victory march and high stepping naked through streets paved with glitter and gold and the next minute I’m bellowing into a megaphone about Fear and sobbing tears of blood and chugging drain cleaner.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can start to discuss where we’re at as fans. Right now, it kind of feels like we set out to climb a big hill, like a nice sized sand dune or something and somehow found ourselves standing atop an Andean peak. I mean, holy shit, it’s amazing that we’ve climbed so far so fast, and a part of me is screaming with joy and celebrating, jumping up and down and hugging the terrified tribal guide who led me up the mountain, but there is also a part of me that realizes “Holy shit! I’m standing on top of a fucking mountain and if I take a wrong step, I’m going to fall 20,000 feet.” And then my legs get all rubbery and I hide like a coward in the snow, hanging on for dear life to the legs of that tribal guide, who’s now disgusted and just wants to kick me off the mountain and go home to his wife and his llama. It’s disorienting and vaguely terrifying, and there will be moments when I accidentally piss myself, but at the end of the day, here’s the deal: we’re standing on top of a fucking mountain, there’s a long way down, but . . . shit, we’re standing on top of a fucking mountain! And we’re standing here because we deserve it.

That’s what can’t get lost here. Amid all the “Yeah, but . . .” nervous gibbering and the epic duels with The Fear, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the Lions have now won 7 straight regular season games – the longest streak in the entire NFL – and that along the way they’ve slain a Super Bowl Champion and won more than half those games on the road. This is no fluke and anybody who says that it is simply hasn’t been paying attention. There are always going to be detractors, always going to be lazy jackasses who insist that we don’t deserve to be standing on top of this mountain but fuck them. We froze and we bled and we died a million different times during this terrible climb but now we’re here and we fucking deserve it.

But that still doesn’t quite take away The Fear, does it? I mean, it certainly helps, but as long as there is an edge left to fall off of, we’re always going to be nervous, especially when we have spent our entire lives as fans falling off edges.

I mean, let’s face it, it’s completely ridiculous but this is the first time since the end of the Carter administration that the Lions have managed to start the season 3-0. That’s fucking embarrassing, but more than that, it goes a long way towards explaining why it is almost impossible for us to trust that this will continue. No matter how much we might intellectually be able to convince ourselves that this time is different, and that the past does not rule the present, our emotional core is too battered and bruised, too beaten by year after year of failure and misery, to feel completely safe.

And that’s why it’s easy to look at the Lions going into Dallas, into Jerry Jones’ Sodom and Gomorrah of a stadium, and foresee a game filled with terrible turnovers, ridiculous injuries and a punt hitting the scoreboard and traveling backwards in time where Brain McCann will pick it up and return it for a back breaking touchdown. I get all that. I do. I’m feeling that just like a lot of you are, and I’m standing at the edge of an icy cliff, staring down into oblivion, an Incan tribesman staring at me in fear and wonder, and I can feel what were the contents of my bowels oozing down my legs. The Fear has me in its terrible hell grip and no matter what I do, I can’t quite escape. But here’s the thing, and this is the thing that we all must cling to – the Cowboys are starting a quarterback who famously wilts whenever the going gets tough. And this quarterback, Tony Romo, is playing with a broken rib, behind an offensive line that couldn’t stop the Care Bears right now, and he’s missing his top receiver, Miles Austin. And, oh yeah, he and that offensive line have the singular misfortune of having to deal with Ndamukong Suh and a defensive line filled with angry vampire apes and the Great Willie Young. Welcome to the Jungle, Baby, You’re Gonna Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie.

Ahem. Sorry. I just got a little too excited there. I told you this shit would get bipolar. But that’s the reality. Those are just the facts. Right now, there is no team in the entire league that Tony Romo and his offensive line want to face less than the Detroit Lions. Tony Romo’s ribs might be powder by the time the game is over. Ndamukong Suh might end the game by chopping those powdery remains up and then snorting them off that giant star in the middle of the field.

Yeah, the Cowboys are 2-1 but they haven’t exactly set the world on fire this season. Let’s look at those two wins, shall we? First of all, there was the game against the 49ers, in which Tony Romo was ritually disemboweled and in which the Cowboys had to stage a furious comeback. And let’s face it, the 49ers are still the 49ers and by that I mean they are the perpetually 7-9 fuck ups led by Alex Smith and not the 12-4 Joe Montana led Supermen of yore. Beating them is not much of an accomplishment, especially when you have to race from behind to do it. Okay, after that we have their win against the Redskins this past Monday night, a win that saw them score exactly ZERO touchdowns. Oh.

So, you know, maybe we should calm down a bit. Even if Tony Romo somehow does survive – or if Jon Kitna is able to somehow use the Power of Christ to, you know, not be Jon Kitna for a change – we have to remember that the Lions have an offense led by Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson who when they’re not being thrown off their game by artificial crowd noise, have been damn near unstoppable. Really, the Lions have the edge on both sides of the ball. Yeah, yeah, I know the Cowboys are considered a force defensively ever since they brought in The Dude to be their new Defensive Coordinator but I’m not quite buying it. They simply lack the horses in the defensive backfield to slow Matthew Stafford down. And hey, I get it, I know that some people are probably saying the same thing about the Lions defense, and, well, they get to say shit like that until the Lions finally shut them the hell up. Through three games this season, the Lions defense has only given up three touchdowns, which should be enough to muffle some of the bullshit gibberish but there’s an even better way to mute all that nonsense and it involves Ndamukong Suh building a new House of Spears out of Tony Romo’s rib bones.

The Lions are going to have people questioning them all season long. That’s just what happens when you spend half a century wandering in the desert being harassed by Failure Demons, flying monkeys, and Matt Millens. People are going to question you. And the only way to answer those questions is with overwhelming force. The only way to get people to shut the hell up is to make them see Tony Romo coughing up blood while Jerry Jones’ face melts off like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Give them such vivid memories that the old ones start to fade. Make them see pain. That’s it. That’s the only way this story changes.

For us, all we can do is climb. That’s it. Keep climbing and try not to look down. Try not to look back. Try to remember that the reason we were able to get so damn high so fast is because we can do this. We know how to climb now. This wasn’t an accident. We earned this shit. Because there are still mountains to climb and we’re all going to have to accept that we can do it or else we’ll all just end up sitting on our asses, crying and gibbering while our Tribal Guide shakes his head in disgust and tells us we’re going to freeze to death if we don’t move our pathetic asses. I don’t want to fall either. I’m fucking terrified. But we have to do this. We have to. We don’t have a choice.

I could keep going on with this dumb mountain climbing metaphor for a while longer but I don’t want to. I want to speak plainly for once. The Lions are a better football team than the Dallas Cowboys. That’s just the way it is. And it’s that plain truth that is the only thing that’s going to matter on Sunday. Everything else – the past, our fears, our hopes, our dreams – is just background noise. The only thing that matters is that Ndamukong Suh, Cliff Avril, Corey Williams, Kyle VandenBosh, The Great Willie Young, Stephen Tulloch, Justin Durant, DeAndre Levy, Louis Delmas, Eric Wright, Chris Houston, Amari Spievey, Sammie Hill and all the rest are facing a quarterback who is hurting, a shitty offensive line and an offense without its top weapon, Miles Austin. Sure, anything can happen, but the odds say that that defense will pound the shit out of that offense. That’s what having the better football team means. We’re so used to looking for some sort of trap door that’s going to open up beneath us because we haven’t been the best team for so long. Bad shit happened to us because, well, the Lions were a bad team. But now the Lions are the better team. That’s why all that weird, stupid shit has seemed to happen to the Chiefs and to the Vikings and not to us, because that’s what happens to bad teams and the good teams are there to capitalize on it and that’s what we all need to keep in mind. The Lions are a better team than the Cowboys and that means something.

Plainly speaking, the Lions are better. They just are. And, in the end, that’s all that matters. Fuck everything else. Lions win.

FIVE NO DOUBT TERRIBLE PREDICTIONS

1. Matthew Stafford will complete 28-37 passes for 310 yards and 3 touchdowns.

2. St. Calvin will catch 6 passes for 90 yards and 1 touchdown. Someone else will lead the team in catches, though, depending on whatever weakness in the defense Stafford figures out how to exploit. This could be Nate Burleson or it could be Brandon Pettigrew again. Or maybe it will be Jahvid Best or Titus Young or Tony Scheffler or . . . this is why the Cowboys won’t be able to stop the Lions offense.

3. Jahvid Best will rebound a bit from last week, running for 70 yards on 18 carries. He’ll catch 6 passes for another 70 yards. He’ll score 2 touchdowns total.

4. Tony Romo won’t last the whole game. He’ll complete 12 of 20 passes for 115 yards before Ndaumkong Suh plays his ribcage like a xylophone. Jon Kitna will come in and spend the rest of the game in silent prayer while Cowboys Stadium is pillaged by the Lions defense.

5. Martin Mayhew will take Jerry Jones out after the game for drinks and when Jerry wakes up the next day in a seedy motel room surrounded by transvestite hookers, he will be forced to buy Mayhew’s silence by giving him a handful of draft picks in exchange for a bag of old balls (not a euphemism for Jerry’s scrotum, I swear) and a Rod Marinelli instructional videotape on the importance of pad level. Incidentally, this is also the way that Mayhew managed to swindle Jones in the Roy Williams deal. I mean, it’s the only thing I can think of, you know? I guess there is always the possibility that Jones is just a dumb huckster hayseed whose singular talent is squeezing money out of other hayseeds, but . . . naaaaah.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 28, Cowboys 20

The Ballad of Jimmy and Jeffery

They’d been driving all night and even though Jim was tired, he promised himself that he was going to see this thing through to the end and if he stopped he knew he’d lose his nerve. After all, he loved the big fella. Always had. It didn’t matter that everyone else told him things like “Goddammit, Jim, the boy’s flat out retarded.” He saw something in him, something that made him want to love the big man. Jim had been around long enough, done enough, seen enough, that he knew how rare that truly was in the world. But things had . . . gone bad. Just like everyone said they would and so here they were, screaming down a Highway to Hell, speeding through the night, oblivion and regret their only destinations. Jim always knew it would come to this – he wasn’t a fool – but still, that didn’t make it any easier. He tried to avoid looking at the big man and turned the radio dial up all the way. Motorhead. That would keep him going until at least morning.

Jim thumped his head, forward, relentless, thundering away in rhythm to the beat, eyes on the road, always on the road, dry, cracked, all out of tears. He heard a soft groan beside him and felt his breath catch in his chest. He was awake. Not now, Jim thought. Not now.

“Jimmy, what’s . . . what’s going on? Where are we?”

Jim swallowed. He tasted bile and had to fight the urge to vomit. He couldn’t believe that the big man had forgotten. Again. He sighed. “Jeffery, I told you we were going to my daddy’s farm.” His father didn’t have a farm.

Jeffery’s face lit up as recognition trickled from the back of his peanut brain to the surface. “We gonna pet the rabbits, Jimmy?”

Jim gritted his teeth. God, why did this have to be so hard? He forced a smile on his face. It hurt. “Sure thing, Jeff. Sure thing.”

The big man clapped. His joy was infectious. But that only twisted the dagger all the more into Jim’s already wounded heart. They still had a couple of hours driving ahead of them, and things like this threatened to derail the whole damn thing. He couldn’t do it. No. Not after all the big man had been through. The man had been through hell, had seen things no man should ever have to see and through it all he had somehow maintained at least a semblance of his humanity. By the time Jim met him, the man had already been beaten and left for dead and from day one people had whispered in his ear that it would a mercy to put the big man out of his misery, but Jim was stubborn. Always had been. After all, you don’t rise to the heights he had risen without doing things your way, without tuning out the incessant chatter of the geeks and pimps who, more than anything, wanted what he had. No. This was his show to run and he was going to do things his way.

It was hard. There was no doubt about that. But Jim liked a challenge. He knew that the hours upon hours of struggle, the desperate days of despair, the weeks and months and, hell, years of backbreaking work would make the reward at the end of the line taste that much sweeter. And they’d almost made it. Almost. Damn it. Jim punched the steering wheel and instantly regretted it.

“What’s goin’ on, Jimmy?” the big man wailed. He then began to moan, panicked, terrified by the outburst.

Jim sighed, and immediately pulled the car off to the side of the road. This was going to be a Herculean task. He knew that going in, but he had hoped that he’d at least be able to keep the big man calm, to keep him from freaking out before they reached the end of the line. Shit. The thought frightened Jim. They were all alone, the two of them trapped together in this little car, and if things went wrong . . . well, Jim didn’t want to think about what the big man could do with that freakish strength he didn’t even know he had.

It was ironic, Jim knew, that his inability to properly channel that strength was one of the reasons why they were in the car right now. But Jim also knew that he didn’t have time to muse on such things. He had a potentially berserk monster on his hands and if he didn’t do something to calm the big man soon, chances were that Old Man Ford would be giving a tearful press conference the next day and that all the plans of a whole city, all of its dreams, would be lost. That was what was at stake here and so Jim stuffed everything else down, into a place black and foul, a place he knew he’d have to pay for someday, a place he knew would eventually kill him, or at least what was human inside of him, and he reached over and slapped the big man, flush across the face.

“Goddammit, Jeffery,” Jim hissed, “calm yourself.” The big man just stared at him, mouth hanging open, catching flies, eyes wide and terrified and Jim had to bite his own lip until he felt the blood flow to keep from screaming with the sorrow inside of his own heart.

“Jimmy,” the big man drawled, his voice quivering along with an oversized lip. “Jimmy, you . . . you hit me, boss.”

The sheer simplicity of the pain in the big man’s voice broke Jim’s heart but he swallowed it and pressed on. “You’re goddamn right I did, Jeffery, and I’ll do it again if you don’t control yourself.”

Controlling his emotions had never been the big man’s forte. Of course, he wasn’t as bad in that regard as his comrades, the ever volatile Dom and the infantile and infuriating Gosder, but they didn’t have the world howling for their blood. At least not like Jeffery did. And that brought Jim’s mind back to the harsh reality facing them both: Jeffery had to pay. It wasn’t what he wanted. Lord only knows how much he had tried to avoid this day, but the big man had always been hanging on a precipice, dangling by a malformed string, and Jim just didn’t have the strength anymore to hold back those greedy pigs with their scissors made of hate, just waiting to cut that string and send the big man to his doom. Goddamn them, Jim thought. Goddamn you, Jeff, he thought only a second later. Why couldn’t he have just held on? Why couldn’t he have just . . . just . . . succeeded? Instead, he made Jim look like a fool.

The big man held Jim’s gaze for a half second longer than was comfortable and Jim’s eyes flicked away. It was a mistake. The big man immediately began to growl, enraged and Jim had no choice but to scramble away before things got too out of control. He pushed at the big man’s chest even as he kicked at the door. He felt it open behind him and then relaxed his body, waiting for the giant eruption he knew was about to come. He closed his eyes and he thought of home, of his wife, of Matthew and Calvin and Gunther and then his life flashed before his eyes, just like it always did when the big man lost his cool. The big man’s growl grew louder, louder, louder and then Jim felt his massive bear paws on his chest and then he was flying backwards, through the open door and onto the grass and dirt below. He hit the ground with a savage thud, felt something crack inside of him and then allowed one terrible groan before the world went black and consciousness left him.

The dreams were savage, terrible, raw – ugly things that pulled Jim’s mind through a labyrinth of despair and terror. In one dream, he was chased through a cornfield by a naked old man wielding a hatchet who called himself Mr. Dick. The old man was furious and was accompanied by a lumbering manservant he called Lynch. Jim thought he recognized the duo but he was too terrified to think straight and so he did the only thing he could do and he ran and he ran and he ran until he found himself alone in a house of mirrors, mirrors of all shapes and sizes, mirrors which distorted reality, distorted the very truths Jim had spent an entire life accumulating, and in these mirrors Jim saw terrible things. He saw a fat man eating spaghetti, he saw an old balding fool with a wild, feral look in his eyes and this old balding fool was clad in only a diaper, gibbering about pad level. Jim turned away only to be met by the reflection of a middle aged fool with a terrible mustache and failure in his eyes. It was the worst one of all the reflections, those terrible apparitions haunting his nightmares, and it almost broke Jim’s mind completely. The reflection was rank with failure, brutalized and beaten by its own utter incompetence. It looked like the ghost of a man stuck in another time, a tired old substitute teacher or a broken down used car salesman. Jesus . . . please, make it stop, Jim thought, and then the world rushed back to greet him, the early haze of a newborn day tumbling down to him from over the horizon, and with it came the pain and the memory of what had gone down before he slipped into his savage nightmares.

“Jeffery,” he groaned and turned his head. There, sitting next to the car, weeping into his ham sized hands, was the big man. Jim tried to move but was racked with pain, both physically and emotionally. “Jeffery,” he said again.

“Aw, Jimmy,” the big man blubbered. “I . . . I didn’t mean to hurt no one.”

Jim just closed his eyes, searching for a peace that he knew he’d never find again. “It’s . . . it’s alright, Jeffery,” he said. “I know.” He exhaled, a ragged breath fraught with pain. “I know.”

“Jimmy, you think people gon’ be mad at me for what I done?”

Jim managed to prop himself up on an elbow. The effort was overwhelming. “It will be . . .” Jim paused. He couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t lie to the big man. “It’s bad, Jeffery,” he said. “It’s bad.”

The big man began to weep. “We ain’t goin’ to pet no rabbits, is we, Jimmy?”

Jim’s whole sense of self collapsed at that moment and he just lay in the grass and stared at the gray sky above. “Jeffery, the world is . . .” His voice trailed off. There were no words.

“Tell Matty I’m sorry,” the big man blubbered.

“He knows, Jeffery. He knows.”

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah?”

“When you all is standin’ there, talkin’ to Sheriff Goodell and cheerin’ on that stage, remember me for a minute. That’s all I want. I just want ya’ll to remember me.”

Jim propped himself up on his elbows again, and the effort almost made him pass out again. But there was something inside of him that overpowered that pain, that fought back against the weary despair and the ragged sense of loss he realized he’d already let take over his heart. “Goddammit, Jeffery,” he said between clenched teeth. “I’m not gonna let it happen like this. You get your fat ass in that car. We’re going back home.” Goddammit. He knew that everyone would be upset, that they’d scream at him, call him names, beat him with their vicious slander, not understanding that each assault only made his resolve grow stronger. “How hard is it to just leave the fool in a cornfield in Indiana?” they’d ask him, but fuck them, they weren’t the ones who would have to look into the big man’s eyes. They weren’t the ones who would have to avoid looking in the rear view mirror while the big man blubbered and tried in vain to chase down the car as it sped away. Fuck them, Jim thought. Fuck them all.

“Jeffery,” Jim moaned.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Help me get back into the car, would ya?”

The big man clambered over and lifted Jim off the ground, cradling him in his massive arms. The big man could be surprisingly gentle, which perhaps, Jim mused, was part of the problem. He knew that when they got back they’d have to spend countless hours trying to get the big man to learn when and how to use that frightening power. Already the big man was squeezing, harder and harder, as if he had forgotten that he was carrying Jim. Goddammit, Jim thought, trying to ignore the sharp pain in his ribs, this is going to be a pain in the ass.

Once they were safely back in the car, Jim took a deep breath and tried to ignore the pain which accompanied it. He probably had a broken rib or two. But that just made him think of Romo and that made him smile and he decided to hang onto that thought and use it to get through the ride home. Yes, Jim thought, things were already looking up again. And hey, at least Jared Allen wouldn’t be around this week so maybe things would go better for the big man too. Maybe some of those howling voices would calm down a bit once things got back to normal. After all, it wasn’t like the big man was fucking up every week. Shit. Jimmy realized that the big man would have to deal with that freak DeMarcus this week and instantly he began to feel the pain again. Goddammit, why did there have to be so many of them? If it wasn’t Jared Allen, it was DeMarcus. If it wasn’t DeMarcus it was Matthews or Peppers or . . . did it ever end?

Get a grip on yourself, Jim told himself. He looked at Jeffery and the big man looked back at him with a beatific smile. No, it wasn’t all bad. After all, they’d made it through worse before. He just thought they were done with all that. That was it. He thought they’d finally triumphed over all the bullshit they’d had to go through back when the big man was abused by Peppers. He could still remember that day like it was yesterday. By the time they all got back to the locker room, Jeffrey’s pants were smeared with his own shit and he was blubbering like Rainman, repeating the name Peppers over and over and over again. But they had gotten through that and after that Jeffery had held up against all comers. He had managed to keep the Grit Merchants clean and so far this season, he hadn’t let Matthew even get touched. God damn that Jared Allen, Jim thought. The asshole had terrified Jeffery, had rattled him with bizarre hoots and grunts near the point of attack, had caused the big man’s peanut brain to turn to peanut butter. Fuck him, Jim thought. Fuck him.

“Jimmy?”

Jim sighed and chanced a look at the big man. It almost broke his heart. “I love you, Jimmy.”

Jim looked away, stared out the window at the empty fields hurtling by and sniffed back a tear. “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For much of the week, I felt good about the Lions. The Fear seemed to be taking a much needed vacation, drunkenly pawing at Lady Fear on some Caribbean island, far away from me and my beloved Lions, and so when Thursday night rolled around and it came time to sit down to write my game preview, I blathered a bunch of nonsense basically summed up as Don’t Worry Be Happy. Almost as soon as I posted it, I felt a little uneasy, like I had just made some sort of colossal mistake, unwisely tempting the football gods and their terrible wrath. But I left it up there, both because most of me still believed in it and because I wasn’t about to trash it and start all over again. To hell with that. I made my choice and I stuck with it. That is where I was as a Lions fan the moment I wrote it, and that was that.

Then I woke up the next day, jingle jangled through my day, made an ass of myself 10-15 times, fought a werewolf, ate his heart, seduced Angela Lansbury and then spent several hours running from her crazed husband, naked, covered in her sweet sex, before I huddled down for the night behind a dumpster, waiting for morning when I knew they’d throw away a bunch of old shipping boxes that I could fashion into rudimentary pants. I then staggered home to watch the Michigan game. Through it all, I was struck with a vague uneasiness, which only grew and grew until it was a terrible freight train running through my strange brain, until it was no longer an uneasiness but a loud, caustic voice screaming YOU HAVE TO GO BACK YOU’VE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE and the whole time I knew that the voice wasn’t talking about my dalliance with Angela, but about my hubris in insisting that there was nothing to worry about against the Vikings. Yes, The Fear returned from his vacation, sunburned and pissed off and he began beating the shit out of me to make up for lost time.

There was just something strange about this game, something I didn’t like. I just felt . . . unsettled. For perspective’s sake, I felt absolutely confident heading into both the Tampa Bay game and the Chiefs game. This felt different, bad different, and if I wasn’t knee deep in Angela Lansbury and if I wasn’t forced to use the majority of my big beautiful brain to evade her vengeful husband - Lord, I can still hear the sound of his hell hounds barking as they relentlessly pursued my scent – I would have allowed that uneasiness to take shape and there’s a good chance I would have spent the weekend ranting and raving like a lunatic, gibbering for all the world to hear about my shameful case of The Fear.

Instead, I buried that son of a bitch in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, in places that would make you insane if I explained them to you – or tried, anyway. There are no words for what truly lies in those halls of madness. I pretended it wasn’t there. I told myself that I was being ridiculousness, that this was just my way of balancing out the absurdity of my preview post. But it never really went away, it just sort of grew and grew and grew until late Saturday night, I had convinced myself that the Lions were going to lose this game. I shouldn’t admit this. It feels like a betrayal of some sort, an embarrassing admission of my own weaknesses both as a fan and a man, but what the hell, my heart is an open book.

Earlier today, as I putzed about, affecting the mien of a normal, decent human being with real responsibilities (I can be extraordinarily self-disciplined when I want to, sort of like the Dalai Lama or Mike Tyson) I listened to the radio in the background (Don’t laugh, I still listen to the radio from time to time.) and just before game time, right before I shut that thing off, Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” came on and I immediately took it for an omen. The two parts of me – the eternally optimistic child of stardust and fire, who believes in Hope and Candy and Rainbows, and the Dark Lord of Fever Dreams who screams of vile Failure and gibbers wild eyed and unrestrained about werewolves and the various ways to ingest drain cleaner – immediately waged war within me, fighting over who would get to decide what the omen meant. The optimistic side said that it was an omen signaling the imminent demise of the Minnesota Vikings. Their era was at an end, the bells were tolling and it was time for a Viking funeral. Hell yes. But then that nasty, pitch black side of me began cackling, whispering the words The Fear over and over and over again and telling me that the only bells that would be tolling were the ones signaling midnight and the end of the Cinderella dreams of me and my Detroit Lions.

And then the game started and Oh Lord, do I really need to describe what happened in the first half to you? All I will say is that I saw a screaming skull peering at me from my TV, accompanied by the sound of a billion Failure Demons farting into a Vuvuzela, Dick Stockton’s devil tongue flicking lies at me in between the noxious hell blasts, and I will admit that I began to ponder the forbidden delights of an Antifreeze Smoothy. The Lions couldn’t do a damn thing offensively and the defense was slowly bleeding to death while they waited for help to arrive. By the time the Vikings scored again just before the half to make it 20-0, I had begun to get philosophical, telling myself that this was my own damn fault for getting too worked up and that this was bound to happen eventually. I wasn’t so much angry as just really, really sad. It was like I had seen the Kingdom of my Dreams finally take shape, the angry haze of the past dissolving into nothingness, clearing the way so that I could finally see The Glory, before the world turned black and that Kingdom of my Dreams melted into the Ruins of my Nightmare. It wasn’t the end of the world or anything, it was just a cruel and terrible lie, a mirage meant to trigger the fires of my heart just so they could be quenched by the cold iron hands of the Failure Demons.

It’s a depressing thought, but what the hell, I am a Lions fan. I have grown used to such things. It wasn’t so much despair, though, as it was a cruel disappointment. I wasn’t giving up. I just didn’t want this beautiful start to end. It wasn’t like I was screaming ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. I just didn’t want this to be taken away from me yet. I didn’t want my dreams to be revealed as just that – dreams. I wanted that dream to be real. I didn’t want to accept that this was still a work in progress, that these kinds of ugly games would devour us too many times this year and that we still had to look to some sort of promised future that may or may not even exist for our salvation. No, I wanted what was here, what was now, what I could see and touch and feel in the moment. I wanted whatever this beautiful ride the start of this season has been to continue and never stop. Never. Never.

And apparently the Detroit motherfucking Lions felt the same way. The second half was a beautiful magical explosion of light and sound, the conquering roar of color exploding into a black and white world which had previously known only sadness and despair. Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson said to hell with The Fear, to hell with the past, to hell with . . . everything, really, and bombed the holy hell out of the Vikings, setting fire to their mortal dreams, burning them down to ashes that just drifted away on a cold Minnesota breeze, where they’ll linger in the air, stale like rank death until they are eventually blown to their new home in Los Angeles. Yes, dudes and lady dudes, it’s possible that the Lions, led by Matthew’s Holy Shoulder and St. Calvin’s Holy Everything, not only came back and beat the Vikings but trampled their collective will – both the team’s and the fans’ – to the point that their franchise as we know it may be irrevocably destroyed. That is hyperbolic as all hell, but it could be true. The Vikings relationship with Minneapolis and its own fans could best be considered tenuous at this point. The Vikings need a new stadium built and Minneapolis is loath to give them one, and I’m guessing that shit like what went down today will only poison that relationship further. Their fans are PISSED. This may have been the final stake in Dracula’s cold, withered heart. For whom the bell tolls indeed.

But I did not come here to piss on the memory of those poor, ruined Vikings. That is just a delightful bonus. No, I came to tell everyone that I was right the first time. We can believe in the Detroit Lions, in the Kingdom of our Dreams. We can believe that things are not only better but that they are substantially . . . different. Different may not sound like much of a compliment, but every single Lions fan will recognize the importance of that word. Every single one of us knows that the one thing we yearned for all these years was simple difference. A change. And that’s what this team has finally, after all these years, given us. This team is different. And they proved it yet again earlier today, when they stormed back from a 20-0 deficit at halftime to win the game in overtime 26-23.

Are there things to worry about? Hell yes. The Lions couldn’t run the ball, the secondary looked the shakiest it’s been all season in the first half, and Jeff Backus was stripped naked by Jared Allen and fitted with a ball gag. I’ll talk more about that shit later on this week, but for now, let’s just revel in the bottom line: the Lions won, in Minnesota, a place they hadn’t won since the Pleistocene Era and they won after coming back against terrible odds, after a terrible performance. They triumphed in the face of ultimate adversity and utterly broke the will of one of their biggest rivals in the process. In that sense, it was an absolutely breathtaking performance and everything else is just background noise to be dealt with later.

This was an important game, a landmark game, one that I suspect we will be talking about for years to come, not because the Lions played a great game – they didn’t – but because of what it meant, not only to us fans but to all those players on the field. They believe now. They believe in it all, in miracles and in that Kingdom of Dreams we so long to see. And it’s about damn time. That bell tolled and when it did the age of the Vikings ended, and now begins the age of the Lions, my Lions and yours, and I believe. God help me, I believe.