A Family- and Sports-Filled Weekend

This was a big weekend of celebration for the extended Gambler clan that included my grandmother's birthday and an early Thanksgiving. (There's always room for another Thanksgiving in the year, is what I always say.) As is always the way with my family--which charts a vast map of sport- and team-allegiances--sports was the backdrop against which our family gathering was held. We went from college football (Go Cocks!), to hockey, to football, to baseball, ensuring that no one had to miss out on the game that they wanted just because they loved their family.

Unless you were a Sabres fan, of course. The Sabres game had the distinct misfortune of not only playing in fuzzy standard definition opposite the invitingly crisp HD of the Florida/LSU game, but also of playing on the evening of my grandmother's birthday celebration, when the TV eventually became occupied by a family portrait tribute slideshow, which watched like a Titanic-length presentation of Awkward Family Photos: The Movie. I'm not saying that it wasn't more interesting than watching the game would have been, but it was just about as long, and we tuned back in just in time to see the Grier goal and the mad scramble to the finish. I can't say I was encouraged by the raw panic I saw, or the apparent lack of scoring that I didn't get to see, but I'm not in a place to analyse the game any more than that. I'm going to accept the win as a win and move on.

The next afternoon was fully occupied by the NFL. As is tradition, my family had a football pool, but the day's real competition seemed to be a quest to prove whose favorite team was sucking the hardest, with the grand prize being a perverse kind of bragging rights that we all know so well. In a group that includes fans of the Redskins, Raiders, and Titans, there seemed to be room for argument, but after the Bills showed up the Browns in what looked like a 60-minute head-to-head Keystone Kops audition, no one else really had a leg to stand on. For my part, I was entertained by the antics. I feel a great amount of sympathy for die-hard Bills fans, but it was hard for me not to laugh like an idiot while watching the Bills fight to gain the line of scrimmage the way most teams fight to gain the first down line. I had no idea it was possible to be so pathetic at football. My advice to Bills fans is to laugh, a) because it's better than crying, and b) because, come on, it's funny.

All in all, it was a fun weekend packed with family and other, less awesome sports. It was a faint reminder that hockey might end up being a gateway sport after all, and that my potential to turn into a football fan is present. If the Bills ever get a bandwagon again--if their bandwagon ever stops being a wheel-less pile of two-by-fours perpetually parked in the dump--I expect I will be there to jump on it.

Tomorrow night, finally, hopefully, back to hockey.