Beer and football VIII — playoffs, week threeAFC Championship

The game: Jaguars at Patriots
The beer: Gun Hill Void of Light Foreign Style Stout
The result: Win, 24–20
The commentary: Complacency is a bitch but also a defense mechanism and that's how a fourth-quarter, two-score deficit keeps the terror-sweat at bay, however barely. You've got it good when your six-year-old declares with certainty—in the second quarter—that "Sorry, the Patriots aren't going to the Super Bowl" and all you can say—and be correct in saying—is "Let's keep watching" because she's six and doesn't know better. I hope for her sake that Brady plays into his fifties.

We New Englanders (excluding half of Connecticut, most of Rhode Island, all of Vermont and undeclared pockets of Maine) can understand not what it was like to be a fan of the dominant 49ers or Cowboys twenty-some years ago but rather a fan of both the 49ers and the Cowboys back then. Sure, the Eagles might win next Sunday and leave us with a mere five championships (so far), falling short of the six the 49ers and Cowboys combined to win from 1988/1989 to 1995/1996, but I'm feeling pretty good because that terror-sweat has been dormant awhile. The Pats could be down ten, fourteen, twenty-five points in the fourth quarter… Gronkowski pacing in street clothes on the sideline… McCourty perfecting bad angles against Alshon Jeffery… but you keep watching because it's Tom Fucking Brady out there.

"I'm feeling pretty good."
Bill Belichick
February 2, 2008

When the end comes it will do so swiftly and never be assumed. It will be witnessed. Everyone will have kept watching, maybe even Mark Wahlberg, and it will be tragic (for some) or wonderful (for most), a moment marked by zeros on the clock. Zeros. Good luck, NFL.

Up next: A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me? Cheers!