Sifting for Hope in the Bitter Ashes of Defeat
Peep Show: Issue #2
Peep Show is a semi-regular series where I go full Hemingway.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."I had no real intention of writing about last night’s NFC Championship Game, and not just because I don’t want to turn this into a football newsletter.
Thinking about the game is basically the last thing I want to do. It hurts. So now I’m going to go all toddler, I guess, and tell you where the boo-boo is. Give me something for the pain and let me die.
It’s all sorta funny because I was very blasé and whatever when Michigan won the National Championship, which I guess just means it’s much easier to be magnanimous in victory than gracious in defeat. But this was different, while also being very much the same.
If the Lions have any kind of tradition at all, it’s in losing. Fans are primed to expect it. My Uncle Joe has never gotten on any of the team’s previous bandwagons, I guess because he’s still smarting over the childhood trauma of watching Bill Munson—who?—quarterback the team. This year made him a believer. It made all of us believers.