A Season To Remember Four-Ever, an Ending To Forget

I am not going to write a recap of the NFC Championship Game, it's just too painful.  Not to mention there are probably dozens of those already.  I will reference it however.  Hopefully not very often however.

Viking Nation is still reeling from the aftermath of Sunday night.  It's hard to just move on and put the pieces of your shattered hopes and dreams back together.  It's hard to put into words what it feels like to have the carpet pulled from beneath you like the Viking Clan did this weekend.  I mean the season had so much promise, it seemed like for once destiny was smiling upon us.  This season seemed different but the ending was the same.  I told my wife (new to the Viking Clan) that in order to be a true Viking fan you had to have your heart broken at least once.  It was kind of like being baptized into Viking Nation.  Well it happened to my wife and to my parents even.

You see, that is something that non-Viking fans/non-native Minnesotans can never understand.  No one else can quite fathom how much the Vikings mean to us, and how special this season with Brett Favre was.  Brett Favre lifted the entire state of Minnesota, once a hated rival he was now our biggest hero.  Any skeptics were erased after the Miracle in the Metrodome.  My parents have lived in Minnesota their whole lives and have watched maybe three or four Vikings games from start to finish their whole lives.  Will when Favre came to town they watched just about every game this season.  I talked on the phone with them before and after every game.  People who had never watched football were suddenly on the Viking Ship.

The rest of the country never cared about the Vikings, once we got Favre we were relevant, everyone wanted to watch us.  The nation was talking about the Vikings because #4 was our quarterback.  America's quarterback was our quarterback.  The flip side of the coin is suddenly we had a bunch of haters as well.  Favre is polarizing and you either love him or you hate him.

Packer fans and Favre detractors will blame Sunday's loss on Brett Favre.  Favre haters or a special sorry breed of people who in my estimation live their whole lives waiting for one man to fail.  They watched all season waiting to say "I told you so! I knew he would fail!"  The get their highs from one man's lows.  They got some sweet satisfaction with Favre's last throw Sunday.  Packer fans and Favre haters (who have become somewhat indistinguishable this year) came out of the woodwork to cheer.  They almost pulled a muscle pointing and laughing.

The difference I see in Viking fans and (a lot) of Packer fans is we have nothing but love and respect for Favre and would never blame this loss solely on one person, much less Favre.  We are smart enough to realize that we would have never been in that position without Brett Favre.  Our season would have ended a lot sooner than January 24th without the Gunslinger under center.  Favre battled like a warrior in that game despite being crushed dropback after dropback.  A lesser quarterback would have thrown in the white flag and claimed his ankle was too bad to keep going.  Not Favre, despite being 40 he kept getting up hit after hit.

So on behalf of Vikings Nation and the the state of Minnesota, thank you Brett Favre.  Thanks for the memories.  The season was a thrill ride and we appreciate the effort you put in.  One error in judgment at the end of the game doesn't erase almost 6 months of great moments.

Now let me say this, I hope the Colts roll big in the Super Bowl.  The Saints dirty defense will hopefully get exposed.  The Saints were headhunters the last two games and put bounties on Kurt Warner and Brett Favre.  They made it pretty clear their whole goal was to injure Favre and Warner and hit them at all costs, legal or illegal.  I have no problems with physical play but when your team is willing to play dirty to knock out a player I have problem with that.  But then again, if the officials are too afraid of the home crowd to throw flags then why not play dirty?

Look, the Vikings had like 6 turnovers so I don't want to blame this loss on the officials but what was up with that horrid officiating in overtime?  It was almost like the refs got sick of officiating and decided they wanted to end the game as quick as possible so they just called everything to let New Orleans get down field as quick as possible.  It started off with that questionable "holding" call on Asher Allen.  I mean that's just standard Charles Woodson/Al Harris defense.  When they do it they're just being "physical outstanding" defensive backs or when New Orleans does it it's fine.  But in overtime of the NFC Championship Game that ticky tacky call needs to be flagged right?

Then we move onto that phantom "pass interference" call.  Yeah that slow fat tight end was making that catch 15 yards over his head if Ben Leber didn't breath on him the wrong way, right?  But no, that flagrant injustice needs to be called in overtime of the NFC Championship Game right?

How about that "first down" booth "review" ( I am convinced they must have been watching Gossip Girl or something under the hood because they certainly couldn't have been watching any replay) where they determined that somehow Thomas got the first down.  When a player is in the air, he doesn't have forward progress for a first down, this isn't the goal line where all a player has to do is break the plane to get credit.  He was (questionably) over the first down marker in the air but then once the ball was knocked loose all "forward progress" is erased and you mark the ball down where the runner landed.  You know about a good yard short of a first down, not 5 feet beyond first down.  But no, the officials were too scared of the New Orleans crowd to make the correct call, or they just wanted to get the game over with one of the two maybe both.

We finally come to that "catch" by Robert Meachem.  Yeah that ball didn't totally hit the ground and bounce up into his arms so he could trap it against his legs or something, right?  No Pete Morelli was too busy watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something to actually do his job.  I mean when Joe Buck of all people is making a case for the Vikings you know that something shady went down.

I am sure Terry Bradshaw was pumped that he got to hand the trophy to New Orleans, you know like he said he would be.  You know because New Orleans "deserves it" because Hurricane Katrina struck 5 years ago.  Somehow that entitles their defense to play dirty all playoffs and get shoddy officiating in overtime.  My wife and I had a bet going to see how many "New Orleans deserves this/Hurricane Katrina" references there would be from the start of the pregame show to the end of the postgame wrap up.  I set the over/under at 5.  We were at 3 by the end of the game and I was too sick to my stomach to watch the postgame , though I hear there was quite a few references in the postgame ceremonies.

That is one of the reasons I am banning ESPN from my house for awhile.  I am sick to death of all of the "well gosh darnit!  they just deserve it so much!" talk.  I am sick of the Favre/Viking haters in the media and all of the other stuff.  I am not feeding the monster any more.  I am sure there are plenty of satisfied windbags out there in the media with a smile on their face because Favre failed but I won't give the power of reading or watching their crap.  The Saints and their fans are not any more passionate or deserve anything any more than any other fan base.

So now the offseason has a familiar feel to it for Vikings fans.  Where do we go from here?  Well we will all wait (probably for a while) to see if Favre comes back.  I know he's probably leaning towards not coming back after the beating he took but I just don't think Favre can come that close again only to fall short once again.  If he does decide to hang them up for good this time perhaps we can get Donovan McNabb?  If not there's always Tarvaris Jackson.  But regardless of what happens we need to draft a quarterback this year.  We need to shore up the offensive line and get a franchise quarterback.  I know people will scream about our secondary but honestly the last three games of the season they played good.  With almost no pressure on Drew Brees from the front four the secondary held that "vaunted" Saints offense to 257 yards.

Overall it was a good season and our team made progress.  We now have that experience of late playoff games.  I think it will make us even hungrier.  To come so close and fall short will only make them want it that much more.  Hey, baseball starts soon.

There's always next year.

Skol Vikings.