Relative Something

During halftime of the Orange Bowl college football semifinal playoff game last night, I switched to the weather channel and watched snow images in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were doing a feature listing all the ways people tend to get injured trying to clear snow.

They were telling kids in Memphis to be ready to make snowmen and have snowball fights in the morning. In a blink, they switched to a commercial warning about some moderate to severe affliction for which pharmacology wanted to sell solutions. That was my trigger to switch back to the football channel. There was a concert going on in the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

One fascinating feature of live team sports competitions is the aspect of momentum. It can be so easy to discern sometimes, especially when it really starts to roll. Oftentimes, it is the sudden shift in momentum from one team to another that causes it to stand out. The team that is on the wrong side of momentum appears helpless to stop the landslide of energy flowing against them.

As a fan, I feel frustrated when momentum goes against my team, and coaches, players, and fans all seem incapable of doing anything to interrupt it.

In last night’s football game between Notre Dame and Penn State, momentum swung around a couple of times. As one who watches games that don’t involve a team I support, I am inclined to multitask and rely heavily on instant replays to catch interesting action when announcers get riled up. That wasn’t working so well for me last night because the teams were running offensive plays so quickly that there was no time between downs for slow-motion replay.

I needed to start actually paying attention. I’m glad I did. That was one heck of a playoff game. Notre Dame fans enjoyed the ecstasy of victory in the end.

Cyndie received a quote on replacing the spoiler stolen from her car. They couldn’t find one from any of their scrap parts sources (which might explain why spoilers are a target), so they told her it would require painting, take a full day, and cost us almost $1000. It’s just so sad. The clips that held the spoiler in place broke when the thief pulled it off and will need to be replaced as well.

With the significance of the losses occurring for so many people in the California wildfires right now, the criminal damage we suffered is not something I should be whining about.

(In case you wondered, I threw in the picture of a window on the barn that I took yesterday for artistic effect. It doesn’t have anything to do with the football game, momentum, or the stolen CRV spoiler. The framing was just something that caught my eye.)

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