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.

Total Victory

Let me start off with a quick confession before we get to the Ballad of St. Calvin and the Holy Ghost, Matthew Stafford.  Last week, I missed the game because of, uh, let’s just call them reasons and leave it at that, okay?  Anyway, I did record the game and intended on watching it right away, but every time I do that, it’s impossible for me not to spoil it for myself.  I mean, the lure of finding out who won the damn game in 1.2 seconds is too much to pass up.  And so that’s how I came to see that the Lions lost in brutal fashion to the Bengals.  I immediately decided that there was no way I was watching that bullshit, but being a masochist, I decided I would watch the Sam Martin shankapalooza, if only out of some sort of morbid curiosity.  So, I watched it, it was the most Lions way to lose a game imaginable, and then deleted the whole goddamn thing.  So that’s why I didn’t write anything last week.

Anyway, that is the backdrop to what went on this week.  It’s easy to see how the Lions could fold mentally and emotionally after something like that.  After all, we are dealing with a band of idiots who have more often than not proven themselves to be as fragile as the most temperamental of divas.  This could get ugly in a hurry.  Friend of the blog UpHere noted the same thing to me in a twitter message before the game.  This was important because it could either make or break this team. 

The game itself was wild and stupid and weird and filled with laughing gas and tear gas and abdominal gas and every other kind of gas you can imagine, but the main thing to take away from this is that there were more than half a dozen moments in this game where this team could have broken, and probably would have been broken in the past.  Shit, with less than a minute left in the game, the announcers were talking about it like it was already over, bemoaning the Lions killer turnovers and talking about how the ridiculous stats of the offense were all for naught, and blah blah blah, we know how this shit goes.  And yet, when the game actually ended, it wasn’t the Lions melting down, but Dez Bryant throwing a tantrum on the sideline while Jason Witten had to fight the urge to physically assault him and Matthew Stafford was mobbed on the other side of the field like Tom Cruise at the end of Top Gun.

The storyline optics there are so blazingly obvious that it feels almost unnecessary to have to actually talk about them.  You saw the game, that shit was stark.  This is the sort of thing that can make Matthew Stafford indisputably The Man.  I know that sounds like something I’ve said before, especially since the Lions have done this a dozen times since he showed up, but this one just felt different.  I think it was because the moment was such a make or break thing, the emotions and brain goo so susceptible to whatever the hell was going to happen, that what actually did happen just felt even more enormous than it would have anyway.  This wasn’t just a come from behind win.  This was a come from behind win, and a display of Brass Balls Big Dick Swingin’ by the quarterback, by The Man, when everyone on the team was looking for something to believe in, for a reason to strap a rocket to their back and blast off to the moon rather than point that rocket straight at their faces and blow themselves to hell.

This was Matthew Stafford leading an army of wavering soldiers into a battle, having everything go wrong and then at the last second, saying fuck it, swaggering into the Kill Zone, and then doing the Big Balls dance from Major League II before putting a bullet between the eyes of the enemy commander and winning the day.  These dudes will follow him anywhere now.  That’s what that moment means.

But before that, you also had St. Calvin sonning the fuck out of Dez Bryant.  Sure, Bryant caught a couple of touchdowns, but St. Calvin had 329 yards receiving, which, uh… this is why you don’t publicly challenge your betters, son.  It was yet another instance of one of our dudes rising to the moment instead of being overwhelmed by it, of becoming a Destroyer of Worlds because that’s what was called for.  And again, in the end, Calvin set the team up to win, and he and Stafford slapped each other on the back, hugged and laughed it up on the sideline, like two fighter pilots recounting a hyper-adrenalized successful mission while Dez Bryant howled with infantile rage, his teammates incapable of concealing their utter disgust.

It’s a perfect picture, one that should be framed on the walls of our hearts for a long, long time.  This was a moment in which the Lions triumphed against all the Failure Demons and the worst parts of their nature while their opponent crumbled.  It was a moment which negated everything else that had come earlier in the game, when all those turnovers and blown opportunities seemed to signal in all too sickeningly familiar neon lights that this team was going to fail the test yet again.  Instead, the outcome of the game, that moment when Stafford literally flew over both his line and the Cowboys standing across from them, turned all of those failed tests into tribulations that made the moment all the sweeter, all the more significant, and, ultimately, a vindication of this team’s mental and emotional health.

The turnovers were nearly fatal, and the Cowboys big plays in the second half still point to a team that is inherently limited.  These sorts of things happen to this team, and will continue to happen, because they are a flawed team coached by flawed men, and nothing is going to change that at this point.  It just won’t.  But you can let that beat you again and again, and ultimately break you, or you can try to live with it and eventually overcome it, to be the best version of yourself that you can be, warts and all, and that’s what I think we saw against the Cowboys. 

But let’s not let one simple and undeniable truth get lost in all this talk of moments and inherent flaws, and the grandiose psychobabble and hyperbolic gibberish I’m letting loose here: the Lions outgained the Cowboys 623-268.  That’s fucking absurd.  They blew them right off the fucking field.  If they don’t turn the ball over, they beat the shit out of the Cowboys.  Even with the turnovers, the Cowboys were lucky the Lions didn’t run them out of the building.  The Lions were just better, and not just better, but significantly better.  The Cowboys, by the way, are probably the best team in the NFC East.  Okay, okay, the NFC East is a horrific dumpster fire of a division this year, but still.  There’s a chance that if the Lions make the playoffs this year their opponents will be these very same Cowboys.  The point is that the Lions are in this.  They’re really, truly in this.  All they have to do is to get the mental shit lined up, and, well… now you can kinda see why this game feels like a big goddamn deal.

This team will break our hearts still.  I think we all know that.  It is just a part of our identity.  But I think now, there is an underlying sense that even when things go all FUBAR, that it’s okay, because Matthew Stafford has returned from the Outback, and he’s returned as a Spirit Warrior, and that he’s got this, man.  He’s got this.  That sort of confidence, that sense that there is a sort of mental and emotional safety net, is contagious.  Not just for us fans, but more importantly, for the rest of the team.  They can just go out and play ball because Stafford’s got this.  And even when it’s not enough – and sometimes it won’t be – that’s okay, because next week, it will be.  That can be a very, very powerful thing.

I just can’t get over that final scene – and yes, I realize it is sort of ridiculous to talk about this almost like it was a movie, but that’s how epic and cinematic it felt, didn’t it? – of Stafford getting mobbed, jaw squared to the world, fire in his eyes, victory in his heart, while the Cowboys bickered and fought on the sideline.  Not only did the Lions survive their own trial by fire, they utterly broke the will of their opponents.  If this were war, this would be Total Victory. 

This was the Boy Prince, the young Lion who was once knocked off his horse against those heathens from Cleveland only to rally his men to victory with one arm hanging, becoming the King, the Lion in the prime of his life standing confidently on the field of battle, calling his shot, and then turning and walking back to his adoring soldiers while the enemy commander crumpled to the ground, shot between the eyes.  Matthew Stafford didn’t just execute a gameplan, he put the whole goddamn war on his back, and he triumphed.  And everyone watched him do it.

This could mean everything, or it could mean nothing.  The only Truth we know is that life is just a series of moments, moments that define us, moments that exist within themselves, beautiful and alone, and in these moments, regardless of what’s happened in the past or what may happen in the future, Total Victory is possible.  And Matthew Stafford and the Lions just had one of those moments, and no matter what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow, that moment will live forever, and it will always be perfect.  Total Victory.

It Was A Good Day

I’ve been burned so many times before as a Lions fan that it’s hard for me to allow myself to truly let go and let the rhythm get me, but there was a moment early in the first half when I clapped my hands together so hard that I worried I broke one of them.  From then on, I was swallowed up in the sea of exuberant fan idiocy, and found myself incoherent and goofy, tongue lolling out of my head like a mental patient, waving like a simpleton at anyone who happened by.  As that notable wordsmith and gentleman raconteur Ice Cube once said before becoming a mini-van spokesman, it was a good day.  Indeed.

The Lions didn’t just beat the Bears, they kicked the shit out of them.  And they kicked the shit out of them in a way that the Bears usually do to them.  You know what I’m talking about.  The quarterback throws an interception, somebody fumbles, a safety pretends he’s riding a horsey and pretty soon it’s an every man for himself free for all, with dudes hiding underneath dead bodies and fans throwing themselves from the rafters.  We’ve all seen it, but for a change, we got to see it and taste it from the side of the blood-drunk victors, and goddamn, that’s some delicious blood.

There are people who will grumble and fret like church ladies because the Lions let the Bears score a couple of cheap touchdowns at the end of the game, but fuck all that.  That’s just paranoid fear-mongering, the sort of concern trolling which has become an art form for most Lions fans, myself included.  We are like fucking Michelangelos of braying fear.  This was a straight up ass kicking, and just because the Bears played out the zombie string like professional football players and Jay Cutler didn’t gnaw on the brains of his offensive linemen, it doesn’t take away from what the Lions did.  They won that game.  Emphatically.  Everything once the score reached 37-16 was basically just noise, the sort of thing that happens when teams, a league and a television network have to fulfill their contractual obligations.  If this were Pee-Wee football, they would have gone to a running clock.

The truly scary thing is that Matthew Stafford really didn’t play all that well – he wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t as sharp as we all know he can be – and the Lions kinda sorta sucked on third down, which was immensely frustrating because most of them were of the easily makeable third and a few variety.  They also turned the ball over themselves three times.  This meant that they left a ton of points on the field.  They still scored 40 points.  They should have scored 50.  Easily.  When that is your only quibble, you’re ensconced safely in a penthouse located on the corner of Candy Street and Blowjob Avenue. 

This was the team we all saw at the beginning of 2011, the team that terrorized everybody, murdered quarterbacks like Mexican drug gangs disposing of used up mules (the people kind, not the poor, innocent animal kind) and seemed like a gang of pirates bent on pillage and dark acts that would horrify the townspeople but make our boys deliriously rich with doubloons and drunk on honey wine and conquest.  In fact, the last time we really saw this team – a team that could run over and around you and kick the shit out of your offensive line and your quarterback – was in the Lions Monday Night Football game against the Bears in 2011.  Sure, they whipped up on the Broncos later that year, but that Monday Night game was the last time it felt like the Lions made a real statement, when they seemed like a team without fear, and a team that could face down a rival and pistol whip them into humility.  While I was watching this game, it struck me that you could almost take an eraser to everything that has happened since, and just say okay, let’s just pick it up where we left off.

Of course, you can’t do that, and like I said, I have been burned so many times by this team and this franchise that I have no body hair left and I am made of nothing but ash and regret.  But, still, the sentiment was there, and that means something.  This is a team of assholes and reprobates, but when they can channel that into sheer physical strength, like prison bull dogs, I don’t really care.  I don’t care if they are assholes as long as they don’t let it fuck with their game.  When they can take it, and harness it just enough to enhance their game, to intimidate and bully an opponent, well…  as we’ve all seen, that’s a tough trick to pull off, but when they can, goddamn, these dudes are nasty badasses. 

Of course, I am mostly talking about Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley, who abused the Bears offensive line.  Just abused them.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bears linemen have to ask Suh and Fairley permission to stand up when they pee.  Suh can probably sell Jay Cutler to Arab slavers if he wants because he owns him.  This is what has been so frustrating about the Lions over the last year and a half or so of wandering the wilderness.  We know this is what these dudes can do if they just harness their natural brutishness.

It was so dominating that they demolished the Bears interior offensive line even though the Bears were holding like desperate men hanging on to the grim tatters of their shredded dreams on every goddamn play.  Suh and Fairly just ran right through them.  It was insane.

The crowd was insane too, marauding and vicious, throwing things onto the field like hooligans, and while the tsk tskers will surely decry this villainy, fuck it, I love this stuff.  But again, it has to be earned, and it’s all part of riding that fine line between intimidating Bad Boyish assholery and the embarrassing hubris of the punk who lives in a land of self-denial.  Just win, baby.

That will always be the struggle for this team and this fanbase, I think, but for today, it felt earned and perfect, and I salute them all with the finest meats, the best beer and the wildest women. 

This was the game I wanted to see, the game I needed to see to make me believe – maybe not in the promise of the future or in the dreams of my heart – but in the potential of the Now.  The Lions are 3-1 right now and they should probably be 4-0.  They have absolutely kicked the shit out of 2 of their 3 divisional opponents already – albeit at home – and who knows?  Who knows what they can do if they get on a roll and feed off of their own momentum?  I think that’s the thing we all need to realize about this team.  They are an emotional team.  They are not cerebral chess players who can turn deftly following adversity and change their tactics.  They are team of emotional brutes, and that means that they are highly susceptible to those intangible things that the Football Outsider types hate to acknowledge as a factor so much.  If they start to lose, then things unravel quickly.  I think that probably speaks to sketchy coaching, but that’s a topic for another day.  But when they win, they can become berserkers.  They become like video game characters that get some sort of bonus that makes them impenetrable to any and all attacks while they just careen through the slaughter, glowing and attacking at ludicrous speed.  It’s just the nature of this beast of a team, and we’ve seen that too.  Remember that 9-0 stretch at the end of 2010/the beginning of 2011?

If this actually were a video game, Suh, Fairley and Reggie Bush would have been literally on fire while the announcers hollered outrageous made-up words as the players turned ten feet tall and threw the goalpost like a pitchfork into a quivering Jay Cutler.  If they allow that momentum to carry them, then who knows what they can do?  That’s enough for me, for now. 

Speaking of Reggie Bush, I’ve been gibbering since week one about how important he is to the offense, and how his presence on the field changes everything from the spacing to the defensive game plan, and, well… allow me to gesture dramatically like a lawyer dropping his hottest piece of evidence on a jury.  Bush was ridiculous in all the best ways, rushing for over 100 yards by halftime – when was the last time *that* happened in a Lions game?  For us, I mean. – and looking a lot like the dude who once conquered Los Angeles like the half-human/half-god spawn of some unholy tryst between Zeus and a gazelle.

There was so much right with this game, so much unqualified beauty.  There are no “Yeah, buts…” here.  There are no lingering doubts.  This was a team that wandered in the desert and somehow came out the other side alive, psychically damaged sure, but still more than capable of slaughtering whatever poor saps they found camping on the shore, coming down from those desert hills like demon warriors from hell.  I am getting carried away here, as is my wont, but in some ways, the last year and a half or so of “Oh God, why is this happening?  No… why?  WHYYYYYYYYY???” made this game even more impressive because it showed that there’s something there, something intact that couldn’t quite be broken, and if that gives this team a quiet confidence to lie just beneath the emotional, beastly surface, then they could be truly dangerous indeed.

I’m just happy right now, happy in a way that I haven’t been as a Lions fan in a while.  Am I going to start gibbering about Super Bowls and Promised Lands?  No, because like I said, I’ve been burned way too many times.  But like the Lions themselves, maybe this will give me some quiet confidence, something I’ve never really had as a Lions fan, and maybe I can smile and stop worrying about the future and what it all means (okay, I won’t because, well, come on…) and accept that today is enough, because today was - and is - a good day.

Belief

Belief isn’t just a word.  As frustrating as that game today was at times there was never a moment when I didn’t believe that the Lions would win it.  Okay, perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement.  I mean I definitely wondered “Wait, could the Lions actually lose this damn thing?” I am a realist after all.  But even though the idea that they could lose the game entered freely into my head, set up shop and started drinking heavily with its friends Fear and Madness, there was never really a time when I thought the Lions would lose that game.  That’s what belief, real honest genuine belief, will do for you.

Even after the Rams kicked the field goal to take the lead with just under two minutes left, I believed.  Actually, to hell with that.  Forget about “even after . . .”  Especially after the Rams kicked that field goal, I believed that the Lions would win.  My biggest fear was actually that the Rams would be able to bleed the clock down to nothing and then kick the field goal.  When they were forced to settle for the field goal with two minutes still left on the clock, I smiled internally and thought “Good, you just fucked up.  Game over, motherfucker.”

That’s because we had Doc Holliday at quarterback and even though Doc was tubercular and had earlier blown his own toe off after getting drunk and stumbling on his way to the OK Corral and was seen spitting up blood for much of the second half, he was still Doc fuckin’ Holliday and when it came time to draw down on those cowardly Clanton boys . . . well, he’ll be your Huckleberry.

Goddamn right.  I believed.  I believed because he has earned it, because this team has earned it.  I believed because they believe in themselves.  You could see it on the face of Jim Schwartz after the Rams kicked that go ahead field goal.  The dude didn’t even flinch.  Instead he just had this confident sort of look on his face, like “Okay, well I guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way,” and then they did.  Less than two minutes later Doc Stafford was running around without a care in the world while the Rams lay on the street, shot down by the best, and Jeff Fisher hung his head in utter defeat.  That’s what belief will do for you.

It wasn’t just in those last two minutes either.  You can tell this team has sort of an otherworldly confidence in itself now.  Yesterday on Twitter Lawrence Jackson was carrying on like a real life character from a Tale of The Great Willie Young and then all game long Chris Myers couldn’t shut up about The Power of Calvin, the team’s new mantra, which let’s face it, sounds like something I’d make up.  It’s kind of surreal, seeing this team and my vision for it meeting in some strange, fucked up hyper-confident Glory Land where players like St. Calvin are deified not just by me and the rest of the fans but by his own coaches and teammates.  It’s strange and wonderful to know that we’re all on the same page, that we’re all a little crazy, smiling bloody smiles and laughing in the face of death all because we share one common thing: belief.

Of course there was plenty of reason for that belief to be shaken, what with Doc Stafford’s aforementioned Tubercular misadventures with a traitorous shotgun, but if anything I just felt like what had gone on was just really fucking weird.  I wasn’t so much worried as I was thinking “well, it’s just one of those things . . .”  And it was.  It was just one of those things.  (How’s that for analysis?)  No matter how much Tim Ryan wanted to talk about Matthew Stafford being off, the reality is that during the first half he was really, really fucking on.  How can I say that about a dude who threw three interceptions?  I don’t know, except that it’s true.  He was both awesome and horrible in that first half, but it wasn’t like he was especially inconsistent or anything, missing on throws and all that.  It’s just that his three bad throws were really fucking bad.  Actually, it’s not even that they were that bad, it’s just that the Rams played human chess and made the right move a few times.  It happens.

Look, I’m having a hard time describing what Matthew Stafford’s first half looked like because, well . . . like I said, it was just fucking weird.  The dude was a goddamn master surgeon most of the time, effortlessly dissecting the Rams on the way down the field and it was glorious to watch.  But then the master surgeon kept knicking arteries and, well, you can be a brilliant surgeon 99% of the time but the moment blood starts spurting in everyone’s eyes that other 1% of the time all that shit doesn’t really matter.

I’m not worried about Matthew Stafford.  I have seen shit like this from him before.  Like I said, it happens.  I don’t think it’s any great harbinger of what’s to come, but rather an isolated bout of weirdness that we can thankfully put behind us since the Lions managed to actually win the game.  If they had lost we could spend time wearing hairshirts, lamenting the fall of mankind and whipping each other with chains made of Fear and Regret, but they didn’t and so fuck it, who cares?  It is what it is.

Stafford actually looked a lot shakier in the second half, which I attribute directly to those three first half interceptions.  He was overthrowing everyone – a result, I think, of not wanting to get picked again – and when he wasn’t, his receivers were dropping everything.  It sucked but, again, I don’t think it’s indicative of anything other than him being a little fucked in the head from the first half.  But by the end of the game, all that shit was just so much noise, the whisper of some terrible memory, Stafford pulled his shit together and blew those fuckers away.  The end.

Really, that’s what I’m taking away from this game.  No matter how ridiculous or weird things got – I mean, come on, the Lions trailed at the half even though they didn’t have to punt until the third quarter – I still believed and so did all the Lions players and coaches.  And no matter how shitty things got, no matter how much Stafford’s head was fucked with and nuked, in the end he was able to overcome all of that and win the damn game.  Did it suck?  Yeah, I groaned and swore at the TV and beseeched the old gods just like everyone else, but when you can suck and still win the game, well . . . things are looking pretty good.

But again, it wasn’t even like the Lions looked inept or anything.  On a down to down basis they looked like a fucking machine.  Stafford was able to move the ball pretty much at will for large chunks of the game and Kevin Smith even ran the ball effectively.  Meanwhile, the defense kicked ass for most of the game and beat the hell out of Sam Bradford while holding Steven Jackson almost completely in check.  There were just those few crucial and damn near catastrophic mistakes, and they almost cost us.  But I’ll say it again, in the end the Lions still won the game, so . . . who really cares?  I don’t think they’re mistakes that are likely to reoccur – at least not with the same frequency or freakishly back to back to back like they did – so in the end, I think they’re just a weird anomaly and I refuse to let them taint this simple and irrefutable truth: the Lions won.

Really, nothing else matters.  The Lions won and they won because they believed.  They believe and I believe and The Power of Calvin is a burgeoning religion.  This game didn’t fuck with my head the way you probably think it did, and that’s a testament to that belief, to the tenets of that religion which have given my life structure and meaning, or at least peace on Sundays.  You can complain all you want about what went wrong but really, I think even the complaints and general bitchery surrounding this game are a sign of our collective belief.  We no longer fear losing to the Rams – sure, it almost happened but deep down I think most of us kept our faith – but we’re still fans, prone to misery and so in the absence of that fear we have come to desire perfection.  It’s not enough that the team wins, they have to be perfect.  Matthew Stafford doesn’t just have to throw the game winning touchdown pass, he needs to throw five of them and then levitate before impregnating every woman in the crowd using only the power of his mind.  This is a sign of how far we’ve come.

Matthew Stafford will be fine.  For fuck’s sake, the dude is only 24 years old and last year he threw for 5,000 yards.  Anyone seriously bitching about him or wringing their hands in agony is just making love to their own misery, their own masochistic need to dwell in the fires of hell because it’s easier than believing in the cool waters of heaven.  Matthew Stafford will be fine.  Repeat that to yourself, say The Power of Calvin three times in a row, huff from your ether rag (I’m assuming you all have one, especially if you’re reading this.) and then tweak your nipples as the Good News overwhelms you in both body and spirit.

The Lions won, the Lions won, the Lions won.  And I never stopped believing.  And that’s the only story of this game that really matters.