'We're Going to the Super Bowl'

After a lot of soul searching, I’ve decided to not really talk about the particulars of The Game. You know…the details; the stuff that we probably won’t even remember in 40 years anyway. Nobody needs a pretend-journalist tritely rehashing what everyone saw for themselves. That’s what the professionals are for.

Instead, I want to talk about what I WILL remember 40 years from now. I want to talk
about what the professional journalists haven’t discussed in the week since: the
utter, wildly surreal madness of the Dome that night. Because simply being there for that was unlike anything I've ever experienced, sports-related or otherwise. It needs to be discussed.

It needs to be discussed because only 57,433 people were able to witness it first-hand. That means that 98.7% of Colts Fandom are forced to speculate...to wonder. And that's just unacceptable. It is. For the city, for the franchise...for the 3.9 million Colts fans concieved as a result of Sunday night. Why? Because The Game now sits alone atop Colts Mythology, for many reasons. Not the least of which is the magnificent surrealness it produced among those watching it.

Put it this way: there aren't many instances in life where an otherwise sane person feels compelled to jump into a sweaty pile of complete strangers and gayly jump around. That may be how things roll in the Keys—or the Hobbit Shire—but not in Indy. Not usually, at least. But there in the 4th quarter, that's exactly what was going down in Section 336, in our 12th-story 118-degree sweatbox we called our "seats." Odder still, on the Surreal-O-Meter that night, a sweaty man-pile exuberantly jumping around in the aisles earned about a
zero-point-yawn-six. If that.

For example, when Bob Sanders made like a NHRA Funny Car to break up that crucial
third-down pass, well...the Dome went into full-blown Lord of the Flies mode. I'm dead serious. There's just no other way to put it. For the first time that night, society's laws were no longer in play for us. We were in international
waters, so to speak. Sure...we had been heading
there for much of the second half—so it shouldn't
have come as a complete shock. Except it did. It
still does. The place didn't just "explode"...it
evaporated into steamed chaos. We went off the
deep end, in every way imaginable. People were
chucking beers and screaming wildly and if there'd
have been pigs to spear, we would've been doing
that too. Like I said: chaos. Beautiful, lawless chaos.

Understand, that exact instant was the perfect storm
of dangerously high B.A.C. levels, years of pent-up
rage, and our first believable realization that the
Colts might actually beat the Patriots. Bob had
handed us the proverbial conch—all 57,433 of
us—and we spoke. Loudly. Then we smashed the
conch on the ground urinated on it.

(You can’t see me, but I just emphatically hurled a
full can of Diet Mountain Dew against my wall. I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder. Whatever. It was worth it.)

And throughout the duration of Peyton Manning’s epic drive—after each monstrous pass and each hard-fought run—the Surreal-O-Meter was continuously cresting, just inching toward the paranormal. In a minute-plus span, we went from nauseously optomistic, to nauseously confident—and ultimately, as the Colts neared the goal line—to wildly raging on PCP, about ready to gnaw through the nearest concrete girder.

And that’s essentially what happened. Kind of.

Because when Joe Addai punched in the go-ahead touchdown, it was the first time in my life that I had come face-to-face with real life hyperbole. I can't overstate this enough: the building was literally shaking. Shaking. (And not "shaking" in the "This place is rockin'!" sense. Rather, I'm talking about "shaking" in the "2.8 on the Richter Scale" sense. The dangerous sense.) I'm not kidding. I don't know if this was expressed on television—or relayed to the proper authorities—but it's the God's honest truth. I remember thinking that we're all probably going to die...but we're going to die in pure bliss.

If you ever want to recreate the experience, inject an entire I.V. bag of morphine into your inferior vena cava. Then go stand directly under a hovering Harrier Jet.

Don't believe me? Fine. Take a look at this video. Then multiply it by 57,432. I'll wait.

(The best part about that clip? It's the half-second shot of the guy in the row above the cameraman...the lone Colts fan not cheering and otherwise looking like my overwhelmed one-year-old at a Cirque de Soleil fireworks show. Poor guy. There's a 92% chance that
his central nervous system had just shut down. It wasn't an uncommon sight, actually. We had those people in our section too. They were noble, balls-out warriors throughout the
first 58 minutes of The Game...but they could never ratchet it down when they needed to. They didn't pace themselves. Therefore, coming down the stretch, they simply collapsed. They short-cirucited. After all, the human body can only take so much. And to answer your inevitable question, yes...it was THAT type of environment. People were mentally imploding. It was fantastic.)

Addai's touchdown was, without a doubt, the single greatest moment in Indianapolis sports history. And it held onto that distinction for about eight minutes.

Then it got kicked into obscurity, relatively speaking.

Sweet Jesus, when Marlin Jackson picked off Brady to seal the game...well, it was absolute, unabashed, hard-core pandemonium.
We're talking real pandemonium—the kind
usually reserved for moon landings or
third-world military coups. I mean, this was
the kind of pandemonium that takes its
coffee black and holsters a sidearm. And it
just pistol-whipped all the wannabe-mayhem
that came before it. Ambiguously gay
man-piles? Lawlessness? Structural
damage? Yeah…those things never
reduced us to tears, really. But this did.
This was different. Because there in the
dead last row of Section 336, we were all
hugging and crying and screaming like
a bunch of just-released hostages.

And I'm guessing most Colts fans—no
matter where they were located—were
doing the exact same thing.

And that's my point. In 40 years, that's the stuff we'll remember. In 40 years, that's what we'll be talking about—even though the professional journalists never did.

You didn't have to be in the Dome to understand what it was like. Because you already know. As if you didn't see this coming, the Dome was remarkably similar to every other environment where Colts fans congregated to watch The Game...only louder. And with $6.50 beers. But it was no less chaotic, no less euphoric, and definitely no less surreal.

Because no matter where you were—whether in a bar or a resteraunt or Section 336—as we all stood there dumbfounded, watching the confetti rain down, we were all struck with the same impossibly awesome thought:

Jesus Christ we're going to the Super Bowl.

And that was the most surreal moment of all.

Monday, January 29, 2007

'We're Going to the Super Bowl'

Here we are, high atop the bleachers in Section 336, late in the
4th quarter...

...and here we are atop the steps of the Monument after The Game, about to perform unspeakable celebratory crimes, reveling in the martial-law-like feel of Downtown.

'We're Going to the Super Bowl'