Don’t take it too hard, she does it to all of us

Chris Appel

The ending of football season brings a little different feel than the ending of a year.

A month ago we made the transition from 2009 to 2010, but the only thing that really changed was the calendar. People’s lives went on exactly the same way on Jan. 1 as they did on Dec. 31, because there is a fairly smooth transition from the end of one year to the beginning of the next.

There is no transition in sports. The football season is here one day and gone the next. No matter how good or bad your team just played for the past 16-20 weeks, one moment you’re belching out the quarterback’s name and the next you’re folding up your team’s jersey for the winter.

A football season is a promise delivered already broken. It’s destined to break our hearts.

She comforts us a few weeks beforehand with reassurances of good times ahead, and then leaves us staring up at the apartment window as she throws our stuff out on the street five months later.

The courtship begins during the last few worthy days of summer, and grows while everything else in nature around us withers. It then leaves us in the dead of winter colder than a penguin’s bottom.

If you’re lucky, you have baseball season coming up. Most people settle for baseball. She’s not pretty (and won’t do that thing you like) like football, but she’s a darn fine cook and is there for you every night. She’s also smart and carries one hell of a conversation, but when football comes along like Christie Brinkley in the red Ferrari we all turn into Clark Griswold.

When the Super Bowl arrives, those of us lucky enough to have not already had our hearts broken are in store for the Fred Sanford “Big One.”

Win or lose, it’s coming. The heartbreak is bad, but the withdrawal is what hurts the most.

We go through withdrawal as chilling as a cold-turkey junkie, but like the recovering addict we go right into relapse as soon as the dealer’s back next season offering us our fix.

Our drugs of choice are called Roethlisberger, Ngata and Orakpo, and all of them carry a high level of dependency. It’s not listed on the package as one of the side effects, but it’s as addictive as a bag of Skittles.

We are so hooked on gridiron that we buy up billions of dollars of the non-alcoholic form of football (television and radio) just to have a taste of the real thing. In fact, a lot of us may never even see the team we love in person, but consider ourselves diehards.

Whether your team is successful or not has little to do with the absence you’ll feel once football is gone. The better your team does may help dull the pain, but even if your team is lucky enough to win the Super Bowl you have but a short time to celebrate before you start feeling the tug on your heart.

Soon we’re pulling the old, stale brews out of the back of the fridge in the form of highlight films and ESPN Classic. Maybe you play video game football (the first fantasy football) in an effort to lead your favorite team further than the real head coach could.

For some of us it’s not that easy. We pull the highlight film out, and can’t even play it. We get it in the DVD player, get it loaded but can never push play. We just let out one muffled cry before putting the disc back in the box and aborting the whole mission.

It’s just too hard for some of us. We want to connect, we want her to remember we’re still here, but we can’t face the fact that she’s done with us.

That is, until she wants us back once August strolls in.

Other than a weekend escape to New York City in April for the draft, and an attempt to get us to care about the combine, we are left with little until August.

That’s when she returns and expects us to act like she never left. She’s not worried about the pain she left you with seven months earlier. She just promises she’ll be here for another season.

The fact that some of us haven’t shaven or bathed since she was last around is lost. It’s replaced by the steam and sound of the shower, and the hum of the beard trimmer echoing from the bathroom.

Got to look our best when that time comes. The one we’ve always truly loved is ours for another five months.

Chris Appel is a reporter for the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Chris Appel at cappel@times-news.com.