Sonic, nipple slips, and Super Bowl gaming memories

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The Big Game, baby! What games are you playing to ignore it?

Ah, the Big Game. The NFL championship. The Big Gambino. I’m just sitting here enjoying a brewski and last night’s pizza watching big men beat up on each other and it’s pretty good. Of course, like usual, I’m sitting beside the TV remote so I can mute commercials and I’m looking forward to turning the TV off completely during halftime.

I like football. I don’t like the pageantry so much. I don’t like the frenzied two week Super Bowl lead up. I don’t like the commercials. I don’t like the NFL, as an organization, because it is evil. The NFL is the reason for the pageantry, the two weeks of hype, the commercials. For convincing you to watch commercials during the Super Bowl “because they’re actually good.” They’re fucking commercials, guys. Come on. When you don’t end your sport with seven game series, you have to make that last one count, no matter how obnoxious.

It is the 11th anniversary of Super Bowl XXXVIII. For football reasons, it is important to me. It is the second Super Bowl win in the Patriots’ fragmented dynasty. Like the first (and next one), it was won with a last minute field goal.

The first Patriots Super Bowl win came 13 years ago at the expense of the St. Louis Rams, the team I root for despite never living anywhere but San Francisco. It was played in the swamp (Louisiana) and I watched from the snow somewhere in northern California. The 2003 season that preceded Super Bowl XXXVIII is the last time the Rams were a good team. They lost a heart breaker of a playoff game in double overtime to the Carolina Panthers, the team that would go on to lose the championship to the Patriots. It’s some mild magical realism of connectivity. I watched the whole thing at a gym, not knowing the team I pulled for would descend into a decade plus of being pretty unwatachable.

Super Bowl XXXVIII has a much wider cultural relevance, though. It was the year of Janet’s Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” the nipple slip, during the halftime show. Even then I couldn’t stand halftime and I had left to go play Sonic Heroes (which, incidentally, would be the start of Sonic games turning to crap). I’ve still not seen that nipple.

Oh. Look. The quarter is ending with a last-second, game-tying touchdown as I wrap this up. That means it’s halftime. And time for me to turn the TV off and go play something for a bit. What are you playing?