Please. You had to see this coming, fellow Packer fans. And not because the defense couldn’t stop anyone — although that alone would have sufficed in the pitless mano y mano of the National Football League, where strengths become weakness and weaknesses become aerosolized, killing faster than a mutating bird flu. Rather, because of the offense, which was predicated on magic.
Countless times this season, Aaron Rodgers would throw the ball somewhere in the ecoregion of Jordy Nelson, running the simplest go route up the sidelines, slathered in defensive back. Nelson, not actually seeing the pass but rather merely detecting its hum, or perhaps the faint pressure change of its rapidly spiraling slipstream, would perform some impossible, porn-star contortion to simultaneously reach over, under and through (through not an armpit or helmet earhole, but through the actual physical flesh of the defender). The ball would strike one of his hands (almost never two) and, after the minutest songbird quiver, bond to the hand, as if cemented there suddenly, while Nelson continued the spiral with his own body, landing with clay-court softness inbounds, swaddled in a cloud of turf and defender curses. It was always hilarious, always astonishing, and always a little occult. My reaction, when I peeled down to it: Suspicion. We had just witnessed something not quite of our world (certainly the world of the Packer fan.) It was too good, and therefore evil. It reminded me of this short horror story I read once about an old tennis pro who played an new hotshot who was beating everyone on the circuit. The hotshot walloped the old pro, who asked him what his racket was strung with. “Gut,” replied the hotshot, smirking. They went to the locker room, where the old pro mysteriously lost consciousness and then woke up bound to a table and screaming, being disemboweled by the hotshot.
Well, sooner or later, you run out of guts.
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