I caught more of the Super Bowl this year than I thought I would. My connection out of LaGuardia - an iffy proposition on the best of days - ran late, and I got a few minutes of long-distance viewing of a monitor showing the second quarter as I waited, and waited, and waited a bit more for the chance to board.
Last year's game, I watched in a hotel bar in Dedham, Massachusetts. I was up there with my father on some family business. Winter wasn't screwing around, not last year, and much of our evening had involved pushing various cars out of various iced-up parking spaces on a cul-de-sac in Jamaica Plain. Dad had done great violence to his MCL, though we didn't know that yet. We did know that we were tired, and dusty, and bone-deep exhausted. So I drove us through the slush and the snow back to the hotel. We showered, cleaned ourselves up as best we could, and went down to the hotel bar for dinner. No restaurant there, just a bar that served food, and a room that got made up for breakfasts. Five or six televisions, though, and we positioned ourselves where we could both see one, ordered steaks and drinks (diet soda for him, a beer for me), and took our time.
The next day, he could barely walk, and business made us climb way too many flights of stairs. But that was the next day.
Behind us, at another table, a fistful of Russian businessmen were trying to take in the game. The intricacies of football weren't quite intuitive to them, so one of the waiters basically spent the entire evening camped out at their table, explaining the complexities of down and distance, and the cover-2, and why many people consider Ben Roethlisberger to be a douchebag. They got some of it, I'm pretty sure. Enough to enjoy the game. Which, ultimately, is what mattered.
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