Printer-friendly

Contact Author

December 18, 2012

Skewed Left

My Lost Weekend with Football

by Zachary Levine

Dear Baseball,

There are so many ways I could start this. How you’ve been gone for so long. How I was in a different area code, so it might not even count. But you probably don’t want to hear the excuses. Yes, I know Rogers Hornsby wouldn’t have done this to you. He would have waited for spring and looked out the window and blah, blah, bullshitty blah. Some of us aren’t that strong, though. I’m not Rogers Hornsby. I never hit four-God-damn-twenty-four either. And yes, I cheated on you this weekend with football.

And you know what? It felt really good.

It started Thursday night in a moment of weakness. It was nothing really, just the Bengals and Eagles, but it felt dangerous and so on Sunday we were back at it. All day and all night.

There was this excitement that I never got on a regular basis from you. Sure there was our all-time climax of climaxes in Game 162, and there were dozens of great moments from this year alone. But I sat several drinks in Sunday night talking playoff scenarios two weeks from the end of the season. The whole thing was a scintillating puzzle, and you know what? With football you can do this every year.

If you already found the bus ticket, then there’s really no reason for me to tell you that I snuck off to New York City for the weekend fling. Maybe that makes it worse, doing it in one of your solidly loyal towns as opposed to a football ground like Pittsburgh or Denver. Manhattan is a funny football town. Walk around Philadelphia on a Sunday and you’ll know it’s unmistakably an Eagles day. New York, however, is without even mentioning the millions of immigrants and natives who don’t care one bit about football, such a city of transplants (at least Manhattan is) that it doesn’t feel like a Giants day.