Overtime

Thirty-nine years ago, it was easy enough to know when your team was playing. Friday nights were for high school. Saturday afternoon was for the colleges. Sundays were the days the big boys played. This was the loose structure that I gave my wife when we started living together. This helped explain my absence on any given weekend in the Fall.
What I forgot to tell her was that in 1970, then-commissioner Pete Rozelle made a deal with the ABC television network to air one game of professional football in prime time. Enough people tuned in to watch the Browns beat the Jets that it became a regular phenomenon. Those same people started taking off early on Monday afternoons and inviting their friends over to watch what many saw as "an extra game."
I can remember feeling personally slighted as Howard Cosell blithely ignored my team, the Denver Broncos, during his halftime highlights segment. It took three years before they let the Broncos play on Monday Night. When they did, the best they could manage was a tie against their hated enemy: The Oakland Raiders.
And that was pretty much that. The Broncos have had at least one Monday Night appearance in every season since. Then, I was watching on Monday Nights even when the Broncos weren't playing. I watched games that no one, not even Howard Cosell, cared about. These days, living on the left coast, I don't find myself in front of the TV as often, since it's dinner time just about the time they kick off, but I can still feel it. It's that last vestige of the weekend, hanging over into the first day of the week, like a promise of more to come. Until Thanksgiving, when they start to play on Thursday nights too. Did I mention that, honey?