This was a Super Bowl in which I had no real favorite. My favored teams had fallen earlier in the playoffs, but I was still happy for Pittsburgh and Arizona. I had been a Steelers fan during their glory years of Chuck Knoll, Terry Bradshaw, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, Mean Joe Greene and all the rest. But I also like to pull for the underdog, and the Arizona Cardinals certainly fit that description. Kurt Warner proved again that he's one of the top quarterbacks of the last two decades. Even with different teams and different talent levels, even with being benched in favor of a younger, glitzier quarterback, he quarterbacks as if he were prenatally designed for the job. The awarding of the Walter Payton trophy, the NFL's humanitarian award, to Warner before the game started was especially touching. Warner had been ignored by the NFL, turned into a league MVP and won a Super Bowl, then benched and overlooked again before coming back this season at an age when others would have been retired. Through it all, his character has been unchanging.
So I was sort of pulling for the Cardinals, and mostly for Warner. I was glad to see him put together that last touchdown drive. But the Steelers deserved to win. That final drive and that final TD pass will be talked about for years.
Now the NFL season is over. I'll miss the excitement over the next seven months, and I'll especially miss it after college basketball closes its season around the first of April. But like the fresh fall air and the spectacular autumn colors, football will return again. Baseball has its adherents and college basketball can be exciting, but, for me, American football, with its varied strategies as complex as chess and war and its combination of graceful moves and brute force is the ultimate distraction.
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I had to stay up late to watch it even though I didn't really care who won. My wife went to bed and wanted me to go to bed, too, but I'm glad I stayed up to see it. A great game.
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