yay

 As I have mentioned here previously, I am currently not feeling the depths of my spectator-sports fandom. What does that mean? Well, I watch a lot of football, most notably the Sunday broadcast of NFL's RedZone. If you are unfamiliar, this is essentially crack for the average viewer. Six hours of commercial-free highlights as they happen from around the league. This predilection dovetails well with the fact that I am commissioner of a Fantasy Football league for a group of teachers at my school. And while my wife's team continues to flirt with first place, I remain mired somewhere near the bottom of the pile, just below our kindergarten teacher who has not made a single move with her team since we drafted the week before the season began. 

Couple this with the fact that there has been no meaningful professional baseball played in Oakland since the start of last season. The World Series just wrapped up. Please tell the rest of the country outside of Arlington, Texas. It was the lowest rated World Series broadcast. Ever. A very good friend of mine who lives in Arizona caught all five games because she was rooting for the second place team. That would be your Diamondbacks. The excitement, to judge by the reports of the week that was, came in the form of the Texas Rangers winning their franchise's first championship. 

Yee. Haw.

Another teacher at my school plays hockey, and so he is regularly asking me if I saw the Sharks game. I have not watched a hockey game on purpose since I was in college, with the notable exception of the time when the Colorado Avalanche won their first Stanley Cup. In their first year this newly christened franchise won it all, and I won some money. From the bet my dad made at the beginning of the season on a whim. I got that ticket when he passed away on the way home from a trip to the left coast. It came to me as an afterthought when the contents of his wallet were dispersed among his three sons. This was not enough to keep me watching hockey.

The National Basketball Association has begun its regular season, and I can't say that I am completely disinterested, but there are two factors that keep me from sitting down and soaking it all in: First of all, there are dozens of games to sit through before they start to figure out who ends up in the playoffs, and by June when things are all said and done, the bright starts of this or that team may be the bottom half of a stat sheet that tipped the other way. Secondly, I have a pretty solid track record that suggests that anytime I sit down on the couch to stare at a Golden State Warriors game, they lose. So I will resume my purely vicarious interest in their progress.

Which leaves us back at football season. Things are heating up, or cooling down, depending on where you live. The most notable stories this year seem to come out of the coaching ranks, where the new coach of my old university's team is getting more attention for any four-win squad I can remember, and the guy the Las Vegas Raiders hired a year and a half ago to run their vaunted franchise has been shown the door. With the promise of more coaches being shuffled across the NFL in the coming weeks. 

All of this distracting us from the relative pain and misery of each passing day. 

Cue the confetti cannons.