Just Saying, Is All...Living the Nightmare with Bill Belichick

Say you’re Bill Belichick, Bubba.

Say it’s Thursday morning, a hundred-some hours After Glendale, and say you wake up with a shitrain pounding in your skull. You’d call it an aimless obsession, if you had to give it a name, or maybe just some kind of terminal dis-ease: this sense that somehow, some way, something has gone utterly and unimaginably wrong.

Say you’re Bill Belichick, Bubba.

And say you don’t know what to do you with your Self.

Things were much clearer in September, when They had the audacity to call you a cheater. Those bastards. You knew what to do back then, of course: Win. Win big. Win without mercy or remorse; win again and again and again, 18 times in all, until They’d learned their lesson, and you’d had your fill—until the job was finished, and until you’d found whatever you were looking for in the singsong succor of Anything-and-Oh.

Say you’re Bill Belichick, Bubba.

And say all the hoodies in the world couldn’t shield you from the sting of the One.

The truth is that you don’t really remember Sunday. All you know is that there was the promise of something Super: of a Climax, finally, of a Conclusion...and then suddenly there was fourth-and-13, and David Tyree, and that cruelly grotesque vision of Eli Manning, crossing his eyes and beaming dimly into the void.

Say you’re Bill Belichick, Bubba.

And say all that’s left now, today, is that withering and waxing and well-nurtured Need.

The plasticity of the human brain is a double-edged adaptation. On the one hand, we’ve got the capacity for perpetual rebirth: for life redreamed and refashioned one thought, one action, one synapse at a time. On the other, it’s awful easy to get lost in a rut—or a winning streak, for that matter.

So pride becomes folly. So impulse becomes fate. So 18-0 becomes prelude to a bummer so woeful, so wretched, that you wouldn’t wish it upon even Don Shula Himself.

Say you’re Bill Belichick, Bubba.

And then thank the Good Lord in Foxborough you’re only just saying, is all...

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