Football season is about to descend on us
Yes, it’s true. It hardly seems possible, looming up at us like an impending storm.
The professional football season is finally here, under the guise of what are called the preseason games, shown exclusively Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, eight times on Saturday and 21 times on Sunday.
The preseason games are like a test, at least from what I gather. Those who survive, and by that I mean players who still have the physical stamina to crawl off the field and be able to attach an artificial anterior cruciate ligament to their knees at the nearest stoplight will make the cut for the team. Pardon the pun. Well, that and those players who they say will not have to hear the words, “Will the defendant please rise.”
There are a lot of injuries in these preseason games, mostly in the locker room and parking lot. These will affect the outcome of not only the team for the season but the coach’s ability to continue his job with an aneurysm that has grown to the size of a goiter; you know the kind you see in African tribes in National Geographic Magazine.
But the real action will be at home. In hundreds of households, men are now preparing for opening day.
They are gathering supplies of food like a pack of jackals surrounding a fallen prey in anticipation of a midnight feast. Team shirts declaring the wearer to be an official National League quarterback will be worn until tiny molecules of atoms have no choice but to disintegrate into particles of dust. Oddly enough, I’ve yet to see a place kicker’s name on the back of these shirts.
Flags, comforters, pillows, hats, jackets and even products guaranteed to increase low testosterone are flying off the shelves. A man not prepared is…well, he doesn’t belong managing the team, even if it is from a recliner in a man cave in his basement, which is where most of the really important coaching occurs.
Oh, I know, you had a different idea of what Sundays would hold for you when you first got married. You thought you’d be out on a lake with your husband lazily rowing a canoe. It would be on one of those romantic days, where the sun is shining brightly, while you sit back in a sun hat and long dress. In between his strumming a guitar, you unpack the picnic lunch. Seriously, once the season starts, the only light he will see is the screen reflection, which may burn those rods and cones rendering a type of blindness. This blindness is instantly cured if there are team cheerleaders in Daisy Duke shorts.
Not to be cruel, but to face reality on your Sunday today, it seems to me you more than likely have something akin to a dead rhinoceros sitting on your couch in the den, wearing athletic shoes, a warm-up suit and eating a chicken drumstick that is the size of one you saw in a history book that King Henry the Eighth was waving around.
Football is a rite of passage for men, progressing from rolling old refrigerators down the side of a hill as children to adults throwing water balloons out of the 10th-story windows of a hotel at conventions for air-traffic controllers or NORAD strategic planning scientists.
There is something about a sport where the participants have a close relationship with paramedics and EMT personnel that is off-putting for women. Not all of them; some women actually are quite astute at the game of football.
But I think those are the women who also who don’t wear rollers to bed at night and pretty much wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of tube socks. I don’t know how they do it.
So ladies, now is the time to act. With all the distractions of penalties, bad calls and offsides, slowly slide that credit card out of his wallet and hit the road for a shopping trip.
Remember to buckle up that seat belt, and enjoy the football season at the mall.
