COLUMN: The big game is here

It’s coming and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. This weekend, “it” will happen again, just like it has for 50-plus years at about this time.

And it will be, and has been, preceded by hours of media hysteria and strange human behavior. But once it’s gone, we enter, as I like to say, the Dark Times of the year.

I’m talking about this Sunday’s Super Bowl.

In my football crazed mind, the end of the game ushers in the Dark Times with no “real” football to satisfy my pigskin craving until the last days of August. That means no gridiron clashes for a total of five months.

I’ve survived this gap every year since the Kansas City Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers collided in Super Bowl I (that’s Roman numeral for one in keeping with the tradition of gladiators) way back in January of 1967. The Packers, led by a fella named Bart Starr, whupped the Chiefs in a game many considered laughable. Surely the upstart American Football League would never win a game against the established National Football League.

I watched it in black and white.

Haven’t missed one since, although about 10 years ago I was temporarily in a hospital room in Vancouver, Washington and had to raise a stink about no TV in my room until the nurses begrudgingly moved me to a room with the Super Bowl on, my A-fib be damned.

I think they upped my medication dose just after kickoff in a mean-spirited attempt to put me to sleep so I would miss the game.

But don’t get me started on that one.

Fast forward to this year. Sunday, after hours (ad nauseam) of pre-game broadcasting and over-hypement (literary license employed there), the game will begin. There have been many Super Bowls where the party I was at took over right after kickoff and socializing became the focus.

But the GAME was on! Whenever someone would yell or cheer, other than when the guy with the next keg drove up to the party house, most of us would temporarily focus on the big screen.

Then, back to the beer and potluck munchies every good SB host put together.

I have a friend back in Spokane who once almost had me talked into building wooden bleachers in the living room of the house I owned, reasoning that I was going to be remodeling anyway and this was the Super Bowl!!

My ex-wife put a stop to that.

In the Super Bowl years I’ve grown to hope for a good, close game more than I have any one particular team.

I will admit the Super Bowls that featured Denver or Seattle had my heightened attention. The year the two teams played each other was the year I had decided to move back home to Montana and had stopped for the night en route from Seattle to Townsend so I could rest...and watch the Big Game.

I watched that game from the Talking Bird Saloon in St. Regis and have to admit I didn’t really see much of it. Fun got in the way!

So on to this year, and an explanation of the whole Dark Times thing. The two teams meeting in this LVII match-up, Philadelphia’s Eagles and the Chiefs, who are still in Kansas City, is not a clash of my favorite teams by any means.

I do hope for a good game and this one may just fulfill that requirement, but I’m sure the party at the local watering hole I’m heading to (Sprite and actual cranberry juice have taken over in my post heart-surgery days) will be the focus anyway.

The game will be played, drinks will be drank and food will be consumed.

And then, the sad reality will set in.

For me, it will be in the waning moments of the fourth quarter when the realization becomes crystal clear that there will be no more football on TV until next August.

Yeah, I know. For non-football fans this may seem a measure of my insanity, but I’m not alone, at least I hope not.

There will be pro football pre-season games returning in August. College football will be teasing me with some up-coming early season contests.

But as of about 7:30 this Sunday night...it’s over.

The black curtain will descend.

Sure, there will be another attempt at Spring football by yet another pretender. But it won’t be the same, never has been and never will be.

And despite the deplorable antics some in the game have displayed in recent years in my mind anyway, of disrespecting the flag the anthem, I will feel like my dog ran away.

I will smile and go on with life, but the void will be nagging me until summer is almost over.

Then, one day somewhere around Labor Day, I will be able to breathe.

College and Pro football will have returned, just like the swallows coming home to California, or where it is they come back to. The autumn chill will return and leaves will turn splendid with color once again.

It will be football season once again.