Gimmicky

Sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't. This is about most every aspect in life, whether it is my absurd insistence on picking up pennies or draping my Cubs wind jacket over the back of a kitchen chair in hopes that it would remind me to mend it, then deciding that it needs to stay right where it is because when it landed there initially, Chicago's North Side team found themselves in the playoffs. Moving it would mess with the streak. You don't mess with the streak.
It is this kind of voodoo that really pays off for people like myself who suffer from fanatical devotion to this or that sports team along with a certain degree of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I tried to laugh along with the rest of the audience when Robert De Niro's character in Silver Linings Playbook has his magical theories about how and why his beloved Eagles win or lose broken down by the fierce and determined eye of Jennifer Lawrence. As if there was some magical combination of rattles, rolls and lucky underwear that would influence the way the ball bounces or the metaphorical cookie crumbles. As it turns out, we have no direct impact on how that happens. Unless we happen to be involved in the actual cookie crumbling or initial baking of said cookie.
Which is why I cannot for the life of me understand why the Indianapolis Colts decided to go with a trick play on fourth and seven late in the third quarter, down by six points. Sure, if it had worked, next week there would have been dozens of imitators throughout the league, in college, all the way down to the pee-wee leagues. The magic didn't work. The silly formation was easily diagnosed by a group of professionals who used it as an opportunity to tackle the lone ball carrier for a loss, which quickly turned into a touchdown for the Patriots.
I played on the Patriots. Back in 1972. Not the NFL Patriots. The Young America Football Patriots of Boulder, Colorado. We had a playbook, or at least we had a stack of mimeographed sheets with x's and o's that were supposed to be memorized by a bunch of fourth and fifth graders, and then executed without hesitation and to perfection. The one at the very back was called "The Dipsy Doodle." In this particular play, everyone on the team was supposed to line up on one side of the center. This was supposed to confuse and confound the other team, who would have no way in their mimeographed stack of sheets to line up against our wacky arrangement of players. I used to stare at that sheet and imagine how amazed the spectators would be when we pulled off our amazing trickeration. I used to dream about how we could use that play to win the game.
We never used it. I spent all that time worrying about, practicing and perfecting that one special play, and we never used it. Probably because our coach knew that we were having a difficult time executing the easy part of our playbook. I never got to run the Dipsy Doodle. Then again, I never got embarrassed by it, either. Sort of a "win-win."