The Real Winner

Beyonce is too bootylicious for the Big Easy.

For those of you who weren’t watching, shortly after her halftime performance half of the lights went out in the Superdome last night in New Orleans. We all waited half an hour for them to come back on, and the game was different than it would have been if nothing had happened.

The Ravens had an awesome first half. They were charging down the field and holding off the 49ers’ attempts to score. When everyone walked off to the locker rooms, the score was 21 to 6. My father entertained us during the halftime entertainment by making hilarious comments like, “someone call technical support, the stage appears to be on fire,” and “is her guitar supposed to shoot sparks? Someone get the stage manager.”

There have been many jokes made about how the flashy show shorted the power, or that it was somehow Beyonce’s sinister plan to attract more attention, but the reality of the outage was that both teams had another halftime.

Halftime is usually a time to regroup, plot out a course of action for the next half of the game, to take back the momentum from the other team or to keep that momentum going. It didn’t look like the momentum was going to change when everyone got back on the field for the start of the second half. The Ravens returned the kickoff 109 yards for a touchdown on the very first play. Shortly after that, the lights went out.

The referees weren’t much bothered by the outage, and were trying to get the players back out on the field to continue the game, but there seemed to be some sort of unspoken consensus among the players that no one was going to get back to work without proper lighting. They milled around, sat down to stretch and stay loose, and waited with the rest of us.

Shortly after everything was put to rights and game play started again, my husband and I decided to take our children home and put them to bed. It was also around that time that there was evidence of a turning of the tide. I got two text messages from my father while we were on our way home, both with the same report: “San Francisco got a touchdown again.” In fact, by the end of the third quarter, it was a game worth paying attention to again, with the Ravens barely leading at 28 points, the 49ers racing to catch up at 23 points.

My husband tossed the kids in their beds and we sat down to enjoy the final minutes of the game. When the end approached and the 49ers looked sure of getting a last touchdown to win the game, we confided in each other. “I have points on the Ravens,” I said. “Mine are on San Francisco,” he responded.

Our pick ‘em league was pretty fun this year. We started off with eleven opponents, all battling to see which could correctly choose the winners for each game. Everyone was required to put faith in their choice, ranking the games from 1 to 16 points. Each week we would choose who we thought would win, based on our gut, statistics, or whatever (one of our members made her mode of choice very clear by making her screen name “picking by colors”). Then we would put 16 points on the game we were sure we knew the outcome of, and 1 point on the game we were the most shaky on, and attribute 15-2 accordingly. Some weeks were pretty hard to figure out where to place my low points (everyone was going to lose!) and other weeks I didn’t have enough high points (I wanted 16 points for four different games!). It was really fun, and I’m excited to do it again next year. Sadly, near the end, not only had I never managed to win a week but also our players had dwindled to four people: myself, my husband, his best friend, and some other guy I don’t know but was glad to be able to compete against.

My husband and I had both been pretty disheartened that the Broncos had failed to beat the Ravens when they faced them in the playoffs several weeks ago. Really, all we wanted for the Superbowl was an entertaining game. I kept the pick ‘em league website up on my computer all week, not knowing if I’d change my mind, checking the stats occasionally to see what everyone else was saying about which way the game would go. It was about 50/50, but there was a slight leaning toward the 49ers all week. I’d put my points on the Ravens early, thinking that it was better for them to win, so we would know that we had been defeated by the champions, but I found myself thinking through the week that it would be nice to see a rookie quarterback take the trophy home, so I wouldn’t care who won, really.

The ending of the game wasn’t terribly triumphant, as it was just one team holding the other back until time ran out, like a brother putting his younger brother in a headlock until the end of the game. It ended with a score of 34 to 31. We weren’t jumping up and down, we just said, “huh.” And then we went to bed.

This morning I realized that I hadn’t checked the league to see who picked what team. I only knew that I’d beaten my husband. I rambled over to the computer and glanced at the website between giving bites of yogurt to my almost-one year old. And that’s when I saw it. Everyone else had picked San Francisco.

I finally won a week!

It didn’t even take a power outage to turn the tide. And it only took me twenty-one weeks to get there.