Super Bowl XL

Steelers + Referees + Cruel Fate = Too Much for Seahawks

Sportswriters and broadcasters often speak about athletes or teams achieving moral victories in a contest they have lost. This phrase is used when a significant underdog loses by a much closer margin than predicted, or when a competitor comes up short on the scoreboard but wins over the crowd to a greater degree than the victor. The athletes and players sometimes buy into this reasoning, snatching the thrill of not quite a victory from the jaws of definite defeat. Moral victories are not credited on any scoreboard. Only wins, losses, and ties are officially recognized.

The more significant a game is, the less weight a so called moral victory will carry. It may be relatively easy to feel good about a tough loss at the beginning of a season, but as the stakes are raised, such a pill becomes increasingly bitter to swallow. In professional football, the Super Bowl is the biggest game there is. Otherwise it would be called something like the Mediocre Bowl. The Super Bowl is arguably the top event in all of sports. Companies don’t spend enough money to purchase a Third World country for the opportunity to advertise their products during the championships of baseball, or basketball, or tennis, or bowling. But when it comes to the Super Bowl, people lose their minds. How else to explain why a respectable woman like Janet Jackson would bare a breast as if she was one of the Bush twins celebrating Mardi Gras in pre-Katrina New Orleans? People who don’t watch an entire football game all season decide to throw parties that revolve around a game featuring two teams they could care less about. The Super Bowl is so special that it is not named by a mere number, but by a pretentious roman numeral. Super Bowl Sunday would probably be declared a national holiday if it didn’t happen to fall on the weekend.