I happen to like Peyton Manning, so I wasn’t rooting for the Saints on Sunday. But watching them celebrate on the field, watching the fans celebrate back in New Orleans, it became apparent how much they mean to so many people. And I started to think about what their victory means to me.
Philip Rivers
The Afternoon After: Specter of pain remains a constant presence
Here are my weekly football thoughts. No LT sightings this week.
Pain is such a part of life that we take for granted the times when we don’t feel it. Never again will I do that after a year in which much of it was spent dealing with injuries of various sorts, and mine were brought on solely by running, the repetitive stress of pounding your lower body against the pavement again and again.
Football pain is on a whole other plane. And in a sport predicated on sheer physicality and enormous husks crashing into each other haphazardly, something catastrophic can happen in an instant. Other sports have injuries, obviously – I have a colleague who acutely observes that all pitchers are injured by sheer definition of what they have to do to play the game – but it’s nothing like what we see in football.
The Afternoon After: Staring down defeat the best way to learn to win
Lots to talk about this week. Let’s get right into it.
As the Saints and Colts chase perfection, they’re doing it in a different fashion than the Patriots two years ago, and that’s probably a good thing, as they’re experiencing adversity.