Mitch Writer

Well, that was one hell of a game, the Ravens and the Chiefs, huh? Playing for the American Conference Championship at Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium before a packed house...

And I wrote this on Friday night, so I have no idea how the game turned out. I'm not Mitch Albom, the verbose, bewigged Detroit writer who once wrote one of his patented cornball melodramatic columns about two former college basketball players who attended a game together and took a lovely stroll to Memoryville and back. 

The problem was that neither of the guys showed up for the game, and neither did Albom, author of Tuesdays With Morrie, a bestseller about the visits Albom paid to a former college professor and all the valuable life lessons he learned at the old man's bedside. By the time he found that the two were no-shows, it was too late; the article was printed, but Mitch blamed his fiction on an "incorrect assumption."

If you're smug in a mugshot, 
that's a Smugshot!

It's a great book if you have a kitchen table that has one leg about 3/4" shorter than the others, because propping up a wobbly dining board is all that book is good for, since Mitch clearly didn't learn lessons about honesty. He made the "conversations" and observations those two men out of plain cloth, and for that reason, nothing he ever writes can be deemed trustworthy. 

So, no, I am writing this column about the AFC Championship at 10:22 on Friday night, but I wanted to share something interesting Peggy and I heard this afternoon. We were in a small store and the lady behind the counter was talking about her plans to take her husband to dinner on Sunday for his birthday, but she realized that all the restaurants in town would be filled with football fans and all their hooting and hollering, so maybe one night during the week...

And then she threw us for a loop and said she plans to watch the game on Sunday anyway. She went on to say she doesn't know what's what in football (she just learned the other day that a first down is a good thing, not a bad thing) but she knows the Ravens are doing well and she wanted to experience the game. 

I got to thinking it might be fine to go into something bereft of knowledge about it, to experience something new on a blank slate.  Might be worth a try.

For crying out loud, there are hundreds  - thousands! - of things about which I know nothing. I'll choose one and get back to you.

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Added late Sunday night:  Yes, the Ravens lost, but that's the way life is. Somebody's gonna win, and someone else is gonna lose. But almost as disheartening as that loss was seeing the social media outcry that the game was rigged because the National Football League wishes to see Taylor Swift's boyfriend in the Super Bowl, My radar goes off instantly when I see that word "rigged." It's sad to see so many people greet defeat with an attitude of "this can't be real" and "it was all rigged, set up to favor the other guy. Surely nothing I did wrong was involved."

I wonder where they get these ideas.