This is a Thanksgiving column, and it’s shorter than the typical daily one because you’ve got football games to watch and, I hope, loved ones to spend time with, and we’ve both got a heck of a lot of eating to get to.
Let’s start with a story that reassures us that, as restraint, common sense and promises to self go out the window at the dining table, we’re not the only ones who will be guzzling away and then regretting it later.
Even Bill Belichick, possibly the last person in sports you’d expect to share a cute, little tale of festive gluttony, rather charmingly told a Boston radio station this week of his obsession with the humble potato.
“Oh, boy,” Belichick told the Greg Hill Show when quizzed about his favorite side dish. “It would be hard for me to turn down any type of potatoes. I’ll go with whatever — mashed potatoes, scalloped, baked. Load ‘em up. Throw some butter on there. Starch me up.”
There is a lot to take away here, given that the New England Patriots head coach just gave more insight on a Thanksgiving menu than he typically reveals about a standard NFL game or simply how a 69-year-old man used the phrase “starch me up,” which surely has to already be on a T-shirt somewhere.
Anyway, tater-themed merriment out of the way, let’s get on with things.
Yesterday, this column was about unpredictability in the NFL and how the wondrousness of the unexpected has lit up this season like few before it.
Here’s something else that’s a bit of a curveball, then. Just a day later, we’re going to celebrate the opposite.
Predictability in sports is never a particularly good thing, except when it comes to the actual sports themselves and the mere fact that we can assume with confidence that they are going to take place.
As 2021 rolls closer to its conclusion, and it is time to give thanks for what we’re grateful for, that might be the best part of right now.
Aside from those strained few months in the spring of 2020, sports never really went away, but they were a shadow of their usual selves for a good while. We weren’t sure what was going to happen, if certain things were going to happen and what they might actually look like.
Now, with the world having adapted to so many changes, fans can get back to being nervous about whether their favorite team or player is going to perform well, rather than whether they’ll be able to perform at all.
In between giant helpings of turkey and innumerable fixings, that’s perhaps the thing those who love sports, whose lives beat to its year-round rhythms, can be most cheered about.
It’s wrong to say that sports are back — they were back a long, long time ago. But they’re back on a steadier, typical, regular footing, and there is some comfort to be found in that.
The adjustments made to the schedule due to the ravages of COVID — such as the 2020 Olympics and the 2020 European Soccer Championships being held in 2021 — have mostly worked themselves out.
Games look and feel like games again, with crowds having largely returned and no more Tuesday and Wednesday NFL fixtures to throw your fantasy planning for an unworkable loop.
The problems of the sports fan’s calendar were, of course, trivial compared to everything else that happened throughout the testing times of the past 20 months, and that should not be forgotten.
Yet it is OK to enjoy what we enjoy as well and to be grateful that sports again resemble their former iteration, in most ways at least.
Now where are those potatoes?
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