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Oh don’t get us wrong, Sunday sucked.  Sunday sucked like an heiress on prom night.  It sucked like every “Police Academy” movie.  It sucked like that flamboyant elf named Lamar sucks candy canes.  If Sunday were a water gun, it’d be called the “Super Sucker.”   Instead of our tasty bird buffet of Falcon, Cardinal, and Eagle, we got dished out a day old plate of “Tur-suck-en” and a side dish of bird flu.  (We’ll get to the silver lining of all this in a moment, but first here’s a heaping scoop of all things suckular.)

5)     Giants won, locking up their playoff spot.

4)     Giants play Pats next week and, with playoffs no longer on the line, have all but guaranteed the Pats 16-0 season.

3)     Packers loss guarantees Cowboys home field advantage throughout playoffs, meaning Dallas can rest its starters next week.

2)     Redskins need to lose next week for Saints to get in.  Redskins play Cowboys next week.

1)     Vikings had a chance to put us out of our misery tonight and couldn’t even do that right. 

Which brings us full circle: Our shot glass is half full.   Look, we all watched the demise of the Saints against the Eagles on Sunday.  That game summed up everything wrong about the Saints in ’07.  We’re injury plagued, our secondary blows, our offense is inconsistent, and the play calling can be downright embarrassing at times, yada, yada, yada.  But somehow and for some reason, we’re still in it.   

Do we even want to be in it at this point?  Well, that all depends on how much of a masochist you are. That feeling of getting your knee caught in a meat grinder, which we experience after every Saints loss, has admittedly almost become bearable.  The blinding pain catches you off guard at first.  Then, once you submit to it, you just feel numb.  We were perfectly content to start writing our “Dear John” letter to this season until about 11:30pm Eastern time when it became official that the Vikings “were who we thought they were.”  Instead, we’re left keeping the faith until Rosie or any other fat lady for that matter starts singing.

If the Saints win next week and the Vikings and Redskins lose, there will be talk that we’re the team of destiny.  That much like LSU, against all odds, we found a way to climb back from the brink of despair.  If just one of the things spelled out in the previous scenario DOESN’T happen, we can know that our destiny was to sit our asses down in the postseason and take stock of what went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it.  We can rethink why we kept Jason David in a starting position all season long and why our secondary blows in general.  We can reevaluate our fickle and oft times drop happy receiving corps.  We can fire our defensive coordinator.  We can plot out our draft acquisition.  And as fans, we can watch a game of football with the peace of indifference.  Not exactly as riveting as cheering your team on through the playoffs.  But hey, if things get too depressing, there’s still half a shot in that glass just begging to help us ease the pain.   

Filed under: nfl week 16