Pro football is back; abandon all hope of romance

Buckle up, ladies; you are in for a long ride. The professional football season is finally here. It’s been birthed after weeks of labor pains called 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. Well, that and those players who will not have to hear the words, “Will the defendant please rise.”

There are a lot of injuries in these preseason games that 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 have been preparing for opening day. They are gathering supplies of food like a pack of jackals surrounding 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 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 Barcalounger 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, much like those English series on television, which no one watches because they seriously can’t understand the language.

It would be on one of those romantic days when the sun is shining brightly. The man is gallantly rowing a boat, while you sit back in a sun hat and long dress. In between his strumming a guitar, you unpack the picnic lunch.

Not to be cruel, but to face reality on your Sunday these days, it seems to me that you more than likely have something akin to a dead rhinoceros sitting on your couch in the den, wearing athletic shoes and a warm-up suit, and eating a chicken drumstick the size of one you saw King Henry the Eighth waving around in a history book.

Football is a rite of passage for men, progressing from rolling old refrigerators down the side of hills as children to adults throwing water balloons out 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, though, and enjoy the football season at the mall.