Beer and football VIII — playoffs, week fiveSuper Bowl LII

The game: Patriots vs. Eagles
The beer: Collective Arts Stranger Than Fiction Porter/Exhibit "A" Danko Double Dry-Hopped Rye Ale
The result: Fuuuuuuck
The commentary: There I was, chain-drinking a pair of bombers with the first setting up a presumed—upon winning—deep dive into socialized literature. Said plans, though, were scrapped early when our defense declared "No more!" So what better time to revisit a Super Bowl that would have left me feeling unclean had the Patriots won than a week before I present Matthew Dicks's Something Missing to the Ladies? Well, not too unclean. Brady threw for over five hundred yards. Christ.

I'm keeping this short because of the… unpleasantness… but also because I've got to start writing up a belated playlist. (I thought it impossible but—yes!—we are at forty-eight songs once more. It was such a struggle to compile that I've appended ten bonus tracks. Be there! Next week?) First up is a reaction to Katie Nolan's new-ish Sports? podcast, to which I immediately unsubscribed (we'll always have Lady Gaga) due to its over-reliance on the forced buddy-flick dynamics that marred her former Garbage Time show. She can carry an hour by herself and I wish she'd leave the "Oh, Katie" contributors gagged behind the glass. (Around the NFL's Dan Hanzus, meanwhile, mocks decency with "comic bits" that overwhelm unlistenable offseason episodes. I await another Marc Sessler spin-off—more on him and Ancient Egypt soon.) Katie and producer/Eagles fan "Ashley" attended and chronicled the game with a wheelbarrow of Coors Light only to make faces at the microphone, weep openly ("You have to at least… give me content") or sit in complete silence during large portions of the "conversation" that were edited into the show. I did like Katie's "I'm wearing a Patriots jersey, will somebody worry about me for a second??" during one of Ashley's apparent fugues but still, you see what I'm talking about? Not a compelling episode or format. And listener voicemails apparently serve as segment producers? Shut up, everyone else. Shut up forever.

Turning Point and Sound FX (watched after a three-month blackout/rehab) close the loop, more or less editing the same footage into different narratives. The former suggests a game much closer than I experienced—I was never comfortable, even after Gronk's go-ahead touchdown, thanks to eight years of Devin McCourty bouncing off tight ends. Sound FX was more honest, showing the Pats chasing throughout and the Eagles playing with an admirable "Fuck it!" swagger. All along they played to win whereas the good guys settled for field goals—and missed ones, at that—too often. There are only so many crunch-time odds a team can overcome in a lifetime and an end-of-regulation Hail Mary (plus a necessary two-point conversion) wouldn't have sat well (though well enough) compared to last year's total-team comeback against the conservative Falcons. I'd complain about Gronk being interfered with on that Hail Mary had Belichick, in all his wisdom as the second-most valuable member of the dynasty, played Thee Malcolm Butler at all on defense over perennial All-Pro defenders Eric Rowe, Johnson Bademosi and fucking—fucking!—Jordan Richards. Maybe Butler wasn't the shutdown corner we thought we had but he could tackle like a motherfucker and was capable of making one play. I'll still buy the man a beer and wonder what might have been: "This session was notable for a brawl between the teams, stemming from some extracurricular activity between local hero Malcolm Butler and talented-exception-that-proves-the-rule Alshon Jeffery. My dad couldn't get enough. G. just wanted more pretzels." Sure, pretzels are nice, but for Brady to set a new passing-yardage record and still be made to bail out another bad defense is ridiculous.

Bitter? Nah. So onward, alright? Summertime, frappes and pizza at the beach, Penobscot Bay, Circus Smirkus, training camp, Canobie Lake Park… Volume 10… Volume 10(a)… Trout Mask Replica… broken Roman-numeral links… "rising second-grader"… and likely, eventually, Super Bowl LIII. It's good to be a Pats fan.

Up next: "Big Ones featured twelve Volume 10 will feature ten hits from the band's three consecutive multi-platinum albums, Permanent Vacation (1987), Pump (1989) and Get a Grip (1993) blog's nine point five previous playlists as well as two forty-eight new songs, 'Blind Man' and 'Walk on Water' including 'Evil Woman' and 'Rock the Clock.'" Cheers!