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Some of this is stuff I’ve already said on social media, but I like to say it here too, so: ::  Yesterday at work, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan brought up the Mets season opener on the Peacock app on his phone. As the Mets were hosting my Pittsburgh Pirates, I decided to watch along for a bit. I watched until 2/3 of the way through the bottom of the 1st. This is more Pirates baseball than I have watched in quite a few years…and yet, watching that single 2/3 of an inning feels like aDown the rabbit hole….

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No, I do not care that Alysa Liu dropped an f-bomb on live teevee. How could I? I personally tend to swear like a sailor, and honestly, her statement perfectly captured that moment, didn’t it? She just skated out onto the ice and proceeded to execute on the kind of flawless level we only expect from the very greatest of athletes. We’re talking, oh, that game in the NBA finals that year when Michael Jordan just started raining down three’s against a hapless opponent (I think it was the Trail Blazers). The only thing I’ve seen like Liu’s performance yesterdayDown the rabbit hole….

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The Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs last week, which they do just about every season when they play each other. But the last bunch of years, when the two teams have met again in the playoffs, the Chiefs have won. Two of those have come in the AFC Championship Game, and one of them is one of the most notorious playoff games in NFL history, the epic shootout in which the Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in the 4th quarter, but somehow they allowed the Chiefs to get to field goal range in thoseDown the rabbit hole….

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I saw this mentioned on Reddit earlier last week, and it’s interesting to think about. It’s pretty obvious that geography plays a strong role in sports: how games and events are scheduled depends on where they are taking place and what needs to happen to get the participants there. Here’s an interesting article about one unique problem: the NBA had to change its approach to scheduling games in Denver because of (a) how distant that city is from pretty much everywhere (the closest city to Denver with a big-four sports team is Oklahoma City, at nearly 500 miles away), andDown the rabbit hole….

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Marv Levy, the great football coach who guided the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls from 1990-1993 during his Hall-of-Fame career, is 100 years old this day. Those Bills teams hold a strong place on my emotional life, even now that the last Super Bowl appearance is more than 30 years in the past, and at this point we’re nearing the entire run of Coach Levy’s time with the team being 30 years in the past. Those Bills teams were my touchstone for home when I was in college, nearly 1000 miles away from home; when I got homesick,Down the rabbit hole….

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Sports writer John Feinstein has died. I have only read a few of his books, but that is hardly damning as Feinstein was very prolific, and he wrote about just about every sport that’s out there. Not only was he a superb prose stylist, but he was especially gifted at translating the human stories of sport into words. He made you feel what it was like to be a ballplayer, or a basketball player, or a golfer, or whatever it was he chose to write about. I will miss his voice and I feel I should make it a bitDown the rabbit hole….

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Here we go again! No, I’m not watching. I haven’t actually watched a Super Bowl since Seahawks-Broncos, and that was eleven years ago. (And I doubt I’d have watched had the Bills made it, in all honesty. That would be way too stressful!) Anyway, here’s some random trivia if you want to show off to your friends at your Super Bowl party. The highest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 75 points, in Super Bowl XXIX (49ers 49, Chargers 26). The lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 16 points, in SB LIII (Patriots 13, RamsDown the rabbit hole….

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I don’t blog about football much at all anymore, obviously. I used to be the kind of obsessive football fan who watched every down of every game the Buffalo Bills played, and then I’d write an extensive blog post about the game after. By the time I was blogging, the Bills were mostly not very good, and most of those posts were post-mortems for a loss. Eventually I stopped watching the games entirely and I almost never blog about the Bills anymore. So this post is not going to be a resumption of regular Buffalo Bills content. However, I just haveDown the rabbit hole….

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There’s been some debate lately after last week’s NFL games, regarding whether or not it’s right, or good, for teams that have secured their playoff positions and who are thus facing a game that is essentially meaningless to not play their best players. The Kansas City Chiefs rested their starters, having already locked up the Number One seed in the AFC, and because they proceeded to lose to the Denver Broncos, who very much did have something to play for, the Broncos made the playoffs and the Cincinnati Bengals did not. (That the Bengals could have made the playoffs hadDown the rabbit hole….