The Pilgrimmage

            If any of you guys see Marty, tell him his game is stupid.

            I’m talking, of course, about the game he taught us (us being just me) on the way to Green Bay for the Opening Game of this year’s NFL season.  Yea- the FIRST GAME.  I don’t think I can overstate how important this game was to me.  Not just the game at that, but the whole experience.  I took off work four hours early to make the trip and I spent most of that time trying to get a hold of Marty to tell him we should have left earlier.  I should probably have taken the whole day off, but I was concerned about using this glorious thing they call PTO too quickly.  We took off about noon, rolled into town about 430 and soon stopped at a parking spot at a local Catholic church (who do you think I am?) and only spent about a half hour trying to navigate through from the Maroon 5 concert to where my grampa was tailgating.

            But in between we played this game which apparently his GF and her friend invented.  It started out being called My Cows among them, but soon added My Horses and My Hay Bales.  So when you see any of these things outside the car (duh!), you just yell My Whatever It Is before the other person or people, then you count up as many as you can see.  That’s how many of those you get.  The idea seems to be to get more of those things than your competition.  I don’t know- competition is not really my cup of tea.  But you do get you Kill those things of the other guy if you see certain objects, for example- a Moving Tractor; Kill your Hay Bales.  But not being very competitive, I don’t quite remember all the details.

            (If you haven’t caught on by now, of course I’m competitive, I was just losing by a ton, so I decided to change the game.  Remember that game I called the alphabet game?  Well maybe I can fix up a hyperlink to said blog post right here, fourth one down.  But if not, I’ll explain a little as a contingency  plan, or just for you guys who don’t care enough to click back.  It involves finding the next letter in the alphabet somewhere outside the car.  The rules the two of us hashed out are that if you call out the letter sometime before you clearly look at something else, it counts as the end of you turn, otherwise you have to keep going, even if you know you missed one.  I have an even more extreme version of said game ready, where you not only time how long it takes each person to find all their letters [cumulatively, like chess], and then, get this, divide each time by the amount of points that letter is in scrabble. X would be money.

Anyway, we played that game for a while, too.  Pretty sure I won.)

            But now that I think of it, there was another competition we were there to see, too.  It involved the Green and Gold, and having had our fill of cheese concoctions, the two of us got to the seats about a half hour early.  My seats.  Well, our seats.  My immediate family’s, that is.

            Listening to a podcast recently, someone brought up the solid point that for as huge a star as Aaron Rodgers is, he has a pretty lame nickname.  A-Rod?  That was someone else’s first.  And yet I have a better idea.  It might sound cheesy (npi, [that’s No Pun Intended; I think it will stick]), but it might be perfect, too.  The Champ.  Or maybe just Champ, referring to the championship belt gesture, and how he actually is a World Champion.  It’s something they would call a heavyweight boxer, say.

            The game lived up to all the hype.  I was hoarse for the next four days, as I have a policy of making sure I Do Not Stop Screaming when it’s the other guys’ third or fourth down situation.  Somehow we pulled out this one without having a very high success rate in this department.  There was a TO or two and Randall Cobb ran one all the way back- I’ll admit I thought he was down, turned to finish paying for my beer, but then he was still running!  I think he’s already made it into Mah list of Boyz, or Mah Boyz.  As in “Randall Cobb, You’re Ma Boi!”  But not everyone can be my boy of course, so allow me to clarify the hierarchy: There can be no more than Seven guys who are Ma Boi (the singular form, of course) at any one time.  And if they get too famous (Rodgers, Matthews), they really can’t be Ma Boi because they probably won’t have the time for me.

Mah Boyz (in ascending order): Cobb; Jermichael Finley (gonna be huge, I know, but I knew he was gonna be good from when I first started watching him, plus I’m probably the only person who calls him Jer; C-Wood (Charles Woodson, second of the TD returning Heisman Trophy winning Wolverines who helped us win a Super Bowl); Mason Crosby (just a dude, and he’s scored me big fantasy points every year); Jordy Nelson (um, did you watch the Super Bowl? Prolly one of the best white wideouts in the game); Tim Mastay (most under-rated punter in the game- won us the NFC Championship); Tramon Williams (just an absolute game breaker).

            You might be wondering why I have a punter in my top two.  All I can say is that Mastay does it with what is still one of the worst kick coverage teams in the game.  They have a knack for giving up big runs at really inopportune times.

            But it all ended up not costing us the entire game.  Raji (another Ma Boi candidate) and Matthews made sure of that.  But when that flag fell in the endzone on the penultimate play, I knew what University of Miami fans felt in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl when that official waited a whole five seconds to throw a Pass Interference flag after Miami thought they had it won.  In all honesty, he has to just pocket it at that point.  I was rooting for the Buckeyes, but that was really atrocious.  Now that I think of it, A.J. Hawk, who had it called on him, might have been on that team.