Arabic Numerals Finally Rule

Finally.
After a season that starts in August, the National Football League plays its final game of the season today/tonight. In light of the number of past professional players who have had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, it's a good thing NFL Films preserves a copy of the game as some of those in it will not remember it later in their lives.

Pay no attention to a FAJF (Fallen Away Jets Fan); we haven't had anything to cheer about in XLVII years. I can remember watching Super Bowl III in Miami, when Joe Willie, Matt Schnell, Don Maynard, George Sauer upended Earl Morrall and Tom Matee 16-7, at friends of my parents' house, just outside of Philadelphia. They were summer home friends-both of our families had houses at Indian Mountain Lake, in Pennsylvania (it wasn't as posh as all this back then).

I and my brother, Kelly, focused on the television as our hosts, Vincent and Albert, separated by about as many years as we were, fought (punching, kicking and wrestling) for nearly the entire time the game was on. We got along about as well as two brothers normally do, but in comparison to those two jablones, we were saints (and we both knew we weren't close to saints).

There were two football leagues back in those days, but for not much longer as the merger of both had already started. Billionaires (and the owners soon became that) hate to share and rigged the system so now they don't have to and helped make professional football players ridiculously wealthy, and we pay ludicrously large sums to be allowed to watch all this happen.

Half a century on, the NFL has Sunday afternoons and evenings, as well as Monday and Thursday nights pretty much all to itself and will, I am sure, in the coming decades chalk up more days of the week as they expand to Europe and Asia because what's not to love about this game as it becomes closer to the reality Rollerball only hinted at?

If Denver and Carolina are bringing the circuses, we seem to be delighted to purchase the bread, beer, soda, pizza, TVs and chicken wings. I'd hope the best team would win but I'm not sure that's even the point anymore, or ever. 

-bill kenny