Then he made an analogy. Back in college, I used to routinely destroy our
roommate Brendan in Tecmo Bowl. For some reason, he always thought he could beat
me, even though I won every game by four or five touchdowns (mainly because he
was dumb enough to let me keep playing Bo and the Raiders). But he kept coming
back for more. And when I unleashed the usual round of post-game trash talk, old
Brendan would come back with things like "Well, I almost had you at third-and-14
that one time!"
"That's what you're like with the Red Sox," JackO told me. "You're like
Brendan bragging that he almost had you at third-and-14, only every season."
"But we're three and a half back right now. You're not even a little
nervous?"
There was a pause on the phone.
"Yeah, I'm a little nervous," he admitted. "But it's still the Red Sox.
And this is still third-and-14."
Maybe so. But it's better than fourth-and-20.
Wouldn't fourth-and-20 be a lot better for him? Wouldn't that mean the Yanks were in deep trouble, needing to punt to the Sox? Shouldn't he have said "second-and-11" or something like that? He just killed the article on the last line! Maybe this isn't Earnest Byner fumbling on the one, or or Joe Pisarcik fumbling on the 26, since there wasn't the gravity of the moment. (If this article were recapping and commenting on, say, a Red Sox World Series title, this would have been the all-time fumble of the . . . online sports lighter-side commentary milieu, I guess.) But it's every bit of Gerald Riggs coughing it up in run-the-clock-out-time and Wes Hopkins running it back to win a regular season game, isn't it?
Or maybe I screwed it up and need to go back to my regular post recapping losses that evoke the tree-falls-in-a-forest query.
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