Hi and hello my fellow football Americans. We got Brad Williams coming up to help bridge us from NFL week 12 to Thanksgiving.

Meantime though, you know what I'm thankful for? Thanksgiving.

I can't stand when people belly ache about any of it. The meat, the booze, family and football.

How dare you speak ill of any of it? Especially football. Also family, I guess, but football. We've been

conditioned by more predictable forms of entertainment, the ones that always end with the

hero winning, which works in part because we collectively agree on who the hero is going in.

With sports, though, half the audience is rooting for Darth Vader. In general, too, football fandom is just

plain more of a gamble. But thanks to football and its pals hockey at all, we're all Marty McFly.

Sports are a time-bending vehicle to the past, present, and future, an upcoming vacation from

tedious reality, something that look forward to next week, next month, or next

autumn, and they provide a rearview mirror that takes us back in time to our pals and our families.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not all pecan pie, unless your pie sometimes makes you sick.

Sports is happy distraction is a naive rationalization. Fact of the matter is they break our hearts and they trample our dreams and it's made

all the worse because we choose to enter the emotional torture chamber again and again.

I wouldn't encourage any young and start watching except for the benefits that come along

for the ride in this sports car.

I get it.

There's something a little weird about celebrating ourselves for watching

other people do stuff. But those other people doing stuff is what James Earl Jones waxed about

at the end of field of dreams. Sports mark history, but not just the history of a mere nation, no,

but our own personal history. But unlike with movies, we football fans don't have to see our

heroes win. Otherwise, how else

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