Regular Season: 55-31-3
Playoffs: 7-5-0
Preface: my preferred milieu for writing these is a public library. Downriver Detroit has three terrific public libraries within easy driving distance for your boy, but times getting harder has made the few local libraries noticeably busier and there’s been a subsequent increase in general library loudness. I don’t begrudge more library goers and the increase making the library a bit louder. The library is the last indoor public place in which you’re allowed to exist without feeling pressure to buy something. Having said that, your boy can’t concentrate in a loud library. The incongruity is too distracting. So I’m somewhat ironically at my favorite Dunky where they’re absolutely blasting Ariana Grande and artists of her ilk. Something about modern pop music hits me like the audio of a soccer game or golf: it just easily melts into the background until it becomes white noise’s fun cousin. And Dunky is a comforting place. I require a comforting place as I bid a sad farewell to the Lions’s shot at ultimate glory.
If you’ve ever been punched in the stomach, you know how apt a metaphor it is for a sporting loss. “Stomach punch loss” is a phrase common in the parlance since at least Bill Simmons, probably earlier. A stomach punch loss can’t match a literal stomach punch for physical pain, but the fact that a sporting loss can inflict even a modicum of physical pain at all speaks volumes.
(Tangentially-Related Digression: I once read a Dan Harmon blog post about how he had a dream where Bruce Willis was taunting him. Eventually Dan’s dream self reached his limit and he took a swing at Willis! Harmon immediately awoke with incredible pain radiating up his arm from his fist because he punched a wall in real life, matching his dream actions. The bow that tied it all together was Harmon imagining a post-incident Dream Bruce Willis back at the Dream People bar telling stories about how he was so effective and convincing in the dream he was able to induce a real person injuring themselves in real life; that being the ultimate goal of mischievous dream occupiers. I bring this up only because I think the proverbial Football Gods have a mostly Old Testament bent, and they glean some pleasure when a stomach punch loss has physiological effects on the losing fans, however small.)
I found myself wondering if the Lions’s loss to the Niners this past Sunday was a true stomach punch loss. The loss didn’t happen on one or two plays, it only felt relatively sudden in the context of the game, but our play throughout almost all of the second half makes it seem less stomach punchy and more “I’m the victim in a movie during that 3-second window where I’m being chloroformed but totally powerless to stop it”. There was, from this fan’s perspective, a fear and a worry that once the Niners had any momentum at all, we were done for. Not because of Lion shortcomings, but because the Niners are that excellent. Now, it turned out both things contributed to the eventual result, but the inevitability felt palpable very quickly.
There’s so much more to say about the heartbreak of this game, sports heartbreak in general, dealing with renewed disappointment when you thought, “Well, at least I’m conditioned to disappointment so surely it won’t hurt as much.” That last part, sadly, has some truth to it. I remember when the then-Redskins totally kicked our asses in 1991. I cried hard almost from the opening possession when the otherwise venerable Erik Kramer put us in an early hole with a turnover inside our own 20. My barely-cognizant football brain could read the writing on the wall: we were about to get destroyed. To this day it’s my most devastating sports fandom loss, and that’s saying something. But this year was different. It should be. An old dude’s reaction to a sports loss should be way different than an old toddler’s reaction. Not patting myself on the back for getting older. Just pointing out that the hurt is still there, just without demonstrative outlets for that pain. And without those outlets that pain has to go somewhere. The destination of choice usually turns out to the be the bottomless pit that conveniently forms in your own stomach. That’s what I did this past Monday morning and what I intended to do until March Madness selections (which seems kinda iffy for my Spartans this year — yikes): bury that hurt deep down, and hope a powerful tree of redemption grows from the seed of heartbreak.
Like everything else in the world, the cycles and patterns that mark humanity’s march through time seem to be repeating faster and faster. Empires used to last thousands of years. Now their peaks seem to last ~100 years. News cycles aren’t even 24 hours anymore. Fact: history’s repetitive rhymes are coming at a quicker tempo. This even applied to my personal sports version of the Kübler-Ross model, more commonly referred to as the Five Stages of Grief.
Denial was easy, as verbalizing our denials have been an unfortunately common refrain among Lions fans for decades, if only because of the sheer volume of losses we’ve endured. “I can’t believe we lost that game.” I’ve said that about the Lions at least 10X more than any other team. And they only play ~17 games a year! Denial is something we still dip our toes in, but honestly only for about 2-3 seconds. “I can’t believe we lost that game.” And then all it takes is someone going, “You can’t?!” And you’re like, “Oh, you’re right. Of course I can.” It may not seem like it, but that instant perspective provided by unmatched historical ineptitude takes a lot of the sting out of a heartbreaker like the loss to Saint Frankie.
Anger is also an easy one if you’re even somewhat emotionally mature. Some past Lions losses engendered a lot of anger. Schwartz’s T-Bird loss to the Texans comes to mind. I was livid after that. Caldwell’s inexplicably bad defense against a Rodgers Hail Mary. My fury was nuclear. But you get older and you realize the anger only hurts yourself. Self-preservation is a perfect motivator to regulate one’s anger. There are too many depictions of anger/rage-induced heart trauma in pop culture for a smart person to hold on to anger. Freakin’ Entourage did it. To die because I got more mad than my heart could handle over sports results would be a moronic way to die. So anger, like denial, is easily side-stepped with just an iota of perspective.
Bargaining is a doozy. Oh gosh, bargaining is a hard one to get past. Especially in sports, especially in football, especially in this particular game. Football games are subdivided into plays, these neat little self-contained iterations of the sport that we re-do over and over again. And even within each of those plays, there are an incalculable number of variables that can totally change each one’s outcome. When only one or two plays could’ve possibly made the difference between glory and defeat, denial is an easy (and logically sound) whirlpool into which one can get pulled. This game had, by my count, 7 (maybe 8) plays that could’ve potentially (maybe probably) led the Lions to a victory. And every single one of them fell in favor of the Niners. That’s what makes it so hard: your team overcomes very long odds to get to this critical point of the season, and then they can’t hit one out of nine on the big plays when the stakes are highest? Oh dear it hurts. The perspective that helps out with Denial and Anger doesn’t help as much with bargaining. You tell yourself, “Well, they had some bad breaks too. They missed a kick. Purdy had some overthrows.” But your brain can easily give your own team credit for opponent misfortune and fail to apply the same credit when the shoe’s on the other foot. THIS is the perspective that gets you past bargaining: remembering that across the sideline is a really good football team, well-coached and consistently good. Maybe the Lions left some chances go begging. But the 49ers’s success still depended on them taking advantage of the opportunities they were presented. They did so. In football, chicken/egg questions all have the same answer: both simultaneously appeared.
I’m not breaking any news when I say depression hurts the most, especially when the team that engenders the depression has a history of losing. That history — which, admittedly, doesn’t matter at all to the current iteration of the team — is remembered vividly by the fandom. That soul-depleting heap of memories comes roaring back in the depression phase because it informs your response to the inevitable question: “Is it ever going to happen?” You begin to think about your older relatives, people who were fans before the people who birthed you had the notion to conceive you. You wonder if their heartbreak is commensurately more hurtful than your own. You wonder about big things like mortality, happiness, unrequited loves, whether or not the universe has morals or lessons as part of its underpinnings or if that’s just us humans misunderstanding God. This particular squad was unique amongst Lions squads: for 3 weeks we were America’s Team. The attention and the positivity became a little much, but overall it was just terrific. It felt neat to know that some family in Montana was like, “You know what? It’d be cool to see Detroit get their day in the sun. Let’s root for those Lions.” Not gonna lie it made me tear up a few times. The positivity and the support felt new and great and unstoppable because it felt pure. It felt like a safe investment for believing “My gosh, we can actually do this thing. The Lions can win the freaking Super Bowl.” The obvious catch is that the bigger these emotional investments get, the more it hurts when the results don’t go your way. I thought I’d be in the depression phase for a while. Two or three days after the game I still was thinking I wasn’t going to be able to watch the Supe. Thought it would hurt too much.
What I thought would augment the depression phase and make it last all the way up to next year’s kickoff was our offseason outlook. I’m supposed to stop being depressed and just accept that this is how it is? But what if this is it?! For Pete’s sakes, Campbell even said that he told the team, “This might be our only shot.” JEEZ Campbell! We’re raw here. And by the way, we know! It’s more than technically true, the league is designed such that our road is going to be much tougher next year! We have some good things going for us, but now the secret’s out. We’re going to get most teams’s best shot next year. We play the NFC West instead of the NFC South. Bills on the sked. Cowboys on the sked again. A rising AFC South instead of the AFC West, against whom we were 4-0. We have six games in a division that suddenly looks much more difficult. Not to mention roster and coaching attrition, of which the most concerning issue was our coordinators. It’s the nature of the beast in the NFL. When parts of your team are obvious strengths, other teams have the freedom to try and hire that which informs those strengths away from your team and have it for themselves. Johnson and Glenn were going to get picked up for a head coaching gig. The rest of the league would be crazy not to snatch them up. They’re smart men and good leaders. It felt like a foregone conclusion over here. We’d be sad to see them go, but we wouldn’t begrudge them the success because they earned it. And they earned it while toiling for our beloved Lions. No negative feelings for the guys who would leave.
Then fate threw an irony ball across the plate. Not only did these feelings lead to acceptance (“Sad they’re leaving, but that’s how it goes. We gotta move on.”), but the acceptance quickly morphed into renewed hope and, I’m not afraid to say it, optimism. You all know what happened: the league passed on our guys. Their collective loss is our gigantic gain. Another year of the same core of guys, coached by the same core of coaches, guided by the same core in the front office. But next year most, if not all, of our key players will be bigger, faster, stronger and better at football. They’ll be guided by an offensive coordinator whose play design is second-to-none and play-calling can reach euphoria-inducing levels. Johnson’s our dude AGAIN, and we’re getting him a year wiser. Same for Glenn. I’ve had some disagreements with his defensive philosophy, but he’s supremely dedicated to maximizing our defense’s potential, and from this seat it looks like he’s hitting his stride as a leader of men. Speaking of leaders of men, our football operating will be overseen by Campbell, who has erased all doubts about any perceived meatheadedness or trumped-up rah-rah nonsense. He’s a terrific, thoughtful coach with courage in his convictions and faith in his players. Reasonable minds can disagree over some of his game decisions, but the vision that informs those decisions is consistent and clear.
The Lions were bad for a long time. At their nadir, you’d hear “I just want us to be competitive” ad nauseam. “I just want to see us playing meaningful games in December.” Well, we’re there. We just completed our second season of meaningful games in December; our second season of being a competitive, relevant, noteworthy and national-attention-worthy team. It feels how I imagined it would feel: terrific. We lost a heartbreaker that we could have won. And it was to go to the Super Bowl. It hurts, but this fanbase has accepted it. This fan in particular has accepted it. There’s no guarantee we’ll get this close again for a very long time, but we’ve accepted that too. We’re the mouse that finally got a little piece of cookie. Now we want a big ol’ hunk of a Mrs. Fields a tall, cool glass of milk. We might not get the milk. We might not see a Lombardi trophy. We might not even see a Halas trophy. But the chase is going to be fun and exciting. That’s not all we ever wanted, but it’ll do.
Thank you very much for reading my thoughts on the Lions this season. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it augmented your positive thoughts and feelings about this team. They gave it their all this year, every play. It was glorious to watch, in victory and defeat. There was a pure-feeling fun to this season that I’ll never, ever forget. But it’s time to move on. And we have the tools to do that now. I’ll be back next week for a Supe Preev and some fun prop bets for entertainment purposes only because prop bets are among the biggest wastes of money I think about. We’ll delve into that next week. But for now, Gooooooo Lions!!!!
Auf Wiedersehen!
