The Lions Are In First Place

The Lions are in first place.

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No, really, they are.  You can even look that shit up.  They are in first place and oh my god this is really happening, you guys, and… okay, hold it together.  Breathe.  Get rational, Neil.  Get…

Fuck all that.  The Lions are in first place!  And while I’m sure at some point the night terrors will set in again, and I will start whispering weird things to The Fear in the dark, where there is no light and only he can see into the wounded places of my soul, for now, I am dancing with the lights on and Hope is clapping in the corner while Victory plays the hell out of the jug.

But the reason why we’re all having a pig roast of the soul right now is because the Lions went into Chicago and beat the Bears in a game which spawned a thousand heart attacks, and almost caused me to jam a wire coat hanger into the electrical socket in my living room to prevent cardiac arrest.  I may have been halfway through dialing the phone to order a hit on Nick Fairley while simultaneously penning a letter of outrage to Herr Goodell for the persecution of the most noble one, The Great Willie Young, but then Big Nick stuck his giant head through the screen and said “Yo, put that fuckin’ phone down.  Now.”  And I did as he swallowed up the Earth and the Moon and the Sun and left us all staring into a New Void, one containing nothing but worlds of our own potential making.

In retrospect, that final obliteration of the Bears ill-fated two point conversion attempt was a fitting way for this to end.  It was a frustrating game by any metric.  The Lions had chance after chance to put the game away in the second half, largely due to the fact that Jay Cutler was reduced to hobbling down the field with the aid of a walker, croaking about how he slipped and fell in the shower and begging somebody, anybody, to check his medic alert bracelet.  But they couldn’t capitalize, as Matthew Stafford played maybe his worst game of the year, and the screen game suddenly disintegrated.  This would worry me, but I think it’s just a momentary blip, as these guys – Stafford and Reggie Bush – are too good and too experienced (yes, we’ve reached that point with Maverick Stafford now) for that to continue for too long. 

This meant that the game felt like a succession of missed opportunities, which felt sickeningly fitting giving that “opportunity” was the overarching theme of the game as a whole.  The Lions needed to win this, and oh lord, wouldn’t it have been fitting for them to lose the game 100 times over?  But those are sick thoughts, and let us not speak too much of them.  In the end, St. Calvin dashed around a mere mortal, plucked the ball out of the air and then it was time for Chicago to plea to false gods and bathe in the frightened sweat of the irrevocably damned. 

Of course, they were almost bailed out by a combo of Nick Fairley morphing into his evil twin at the worst possible time (well, even more evil anyway) and a ref enacting his family’s revenge for an ancient grudge feud with The Great Willie Young dating back to 1852, but then Fairley commenced with his planet swallowing and that was that.  Nick Fairley, Eater of Worlds, had arrived, and all the Bears could do was hang their heads low and know that they had just met a supernatural force.  Josh McCown went and sat down on the bench, to ponder what if, while Jay Cutler received mouth to mouth in the locker room and shat himself.

Meanwhile, Fairley did a fat man high step down the field that shook the earth, and caused frightened birds to flee from their nests in the Sears Tower and animals at the zoo to roar in panic.  The bones of the T-Rex at the History Museum shuddered and Chicagoland put aside all their cares and worries, put down the guns and prayed to the East, to the new Mecca of Fairley, and… okay, yes, I am getting carried away here and somebody probably just put a fatwa on me, but it’s worth it, friends.  It’s worth it because the Lions are in first place.  They are.  It says so in the standings, which state that the Lions are in first place, which means that they have a better record than anybody else in the division, which means they are in first place.  They are.  In first place.  In first…

Okay.  Right.  Anyway, there was a beautiful synchronicity to that game (and oh lord, you know we’re in trouble when I start gibbering about synchronicity again…)  It was one of those things that unfolded in seemingly terrible and obscene ways, but when it was all over, it was impossible to imagine it playing out any other way than it did.  It just felt right.  The Lions were plagued by all their usual demons, but instead of letting that define them, they said “shut the fuck up, demons” and then Nick Fairley ate them.  And wasn’t there something just so perfectly beautiful and synchronous about the Bears having their go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter wiped off the board because Alshon Jeffery didn’t complete the process of the catch?  I mean, this is where that heinous monster was born and then unleashed on the world by the Lizard Man Pereira.  Today, that monster turned around and ate the people who cowardly hid under its wings that fateful day, and then Nick Fairley ate it.

Look, there will probably be a lot of time to quaver in fear and wear sandwich boards around town proclaiming the end is nigh, and I’m sure at some point soon I will compare Nick Fairley to Lenny Small and his locker will be searched for the corpses of dead bunny rabbits, but for now, I just want to bask in the perfect beauty of this day.  For today, Jay Cutler is being airlifted to the Mayo clinic while Aaron Rodgers’ spends his time with his arm in a sling, sadly browsing local shops for a mustache comb, pondering the meaninglessness of a wasted year, and the Lions are celebrating into the night and Nick Fairley is high-stepping down Lake Michigan Avenue like Godzilla while the locals flee and the National Guard offers their unconditional surrender because the Lions are in first place.  The Lions are in first place.