NFL Football: Get Off the Couch and Go to the Stadium!

The hoarse throat at screaming for your team to score a game-winning touchdown.

The tears of joy seeing your heroes come back for one more lap of glory.

The goosebumps at seeing F-18 jets fly only hundreds of feet above your heads.

Oh, and winning the game was just the icing on the cake.

These are the emotions I felt when I attended the Patriots-Bills game this Monday night at Gillette Stadium. 

They are also ones I would have never had if I watched the game on TV.

With the debate raging across the country recently over TV blackouts in Jacksonville, Detroit, and Oakland, and whether or not the NFL should change its policy, the answer is simple:

Get off the couch and go to the games!

A live sporting event, especially NFL football, is something that is unmatched in life.

You spend three hours cheering on random individuals who you will never meet along side random fans who you will only know for one night.

And yet, that's the magic of sports.

It implies a sense of community, of camaraderie, that is rarely accomplished in life.

In today's "Me First" society, live sports still allow us to connect with others in a common goal: to will our team on to victory

This was no more evident to me than at the end of the Patriots game, when Brady passed to Ben Watson for the game winning touchdown.

Fans started hugging, crying, slapping five with each other, most of whom didn't know one another only three hours before.

There was screaming, cheering and a general sense of happiness that is rare in today's America.

If I was home, I would have cheered with my dad, said goodnight and crawled into bed.

But there is extra pride when you hear "Let's Go Pats" screamed by 68,000 of your fellow New Englanders.

I can now proudly tell my children that I saw one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history do what he does best live and in person: engineer a fourth-quarter comeback.

The question is: Can you?