People who we hate—this is as opposed to people, comma, who we hate—like to criticize Al Michaels for not seeming properly effusive about some idiotic false start penalty in a nothing vs. nothing game, played on a Thursday night and aired on Jeff Bezos's principal home surveillance tool. This is all fair, although to be frank, Michaels has seen everything a thousand times during his long career; it would be not just weird but worrying if he was hooting and hollering over the ordinary nonsense like some unhinged post-Ritalin Kevin Harlan. It’s just the Jaguars on a weeknight, and also the man just turned 80.
But Thursday night's Steelers-Browns game, a blizzard that happened to feature yard lines and penalty flags, turned Michaels absolutely giddy. The ultimate broadcasting lifer became your 7-year-old on Christmas morning, full of wonder and delight and processed sugar, tucking into his gig as if every play was a hunk of prime rib with a double-baked tater the size of your spaniel's head and a Balvenie on the side, neat—all fed to him forkful by straining forkful by Jane Fonda circa Barbarella.
And on matters of faith like these, we must trust Michaels implicitly. The Browns are largely dreadful, the Steelers live on Chris Boswell's foot, and Mike Tomlin's ability to glare people into submission—in other words, this game should have reeked with all the foul aromas that the Thursday schedule typically provides. In regular weather, there is every reason to believe it would have been the toughest of sits.
Instead, amid all this Lake Effect carnage, it was magic—pure unadulterated CGI as provided by the Premier of Greenland. It was the first true bad-weather game of the season, and it was loopy and cinematic enough to make you negotiate the sale of one or more of your children for more like it. When we said bad weather, we mean atrocious—glorious, blinding, uninterrupted windblown squalls that dumped little pyramids of snow on every helmet, shoulder pad, and cap brim. When Michaels said late in the game after the Steelers went ahead, 19-18, "29 degrees, on the shores of Lake Erie," he used the tone of voice he must have used to propose to his wife, and seemed utterly captivated to an almost unsettling degree by the thousands of Browns fans who refused to leave the stadium even as the snow climbed up their calves. “Nobody has left,” he cried later, in the voice of a man who seemed not just ready but eager to stay there all night himself.
But it had to end. The home fans were ultimately rewarded with the joyous hypothermia that comes with watching their orange-hatted mopes blow a 12-point fourth quarter lead and still end up winning, 24-19. Nick Chubb punched his way in from the ... oh, who gives a damn? It snowed like midwinter on Neptune all night, there were two punts that traveled 15 yards or fewer, and no one involved really seemed to be able to see very well. This renders your bets, your fantasy team, your playoff and draft position projections, even your love of traditional rivalries and all that other stupid NFL mythmaking moot. More than moot, in fact. Sub-stupid. Yeah, that's the hyphenate we were groping for.
But that's the beauty of seriously bad-weather football. For all its mechanized grimness and the overproduced sameness that makes every NFL game look like every other NFL game, playing a football game in snow and mud makes almost all the league’s antisocial fetishes less crushingly evident, and makes the game notably more game-like. Since there was no mud Thursday night, the snow had to carry the show, and it did—the field was white, with only the rude interruption of the yard lines that some spoilsport insisted upon plowing repeatedly so that people could figure out where the ball was. As though that mattered. When Michaels lost sight of Boswell's second field goal, he explained the entire event in its magnificent Siberian totality—with amused bafflement, and baffled amusement.
It is why domed stadiums inherently suck—ask the Tampa Bay Rays. It's why perfect conditions that allow all the players their best chance to excel are the enemy of all that is right and good, and everything that’s best about sports. It's why the NFL season shouldn't start until mid-November, when the weather is at its least clement and the plays look less like choreography and more like primordial slogs. And who doesn't like their slogs to be as primordial as possible?
Our Al sure doesn’t. He hasn't been this happy since he found out that he was traded by ESPN for the rights to Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, and that was 18 years ago. Ask your parents. They'll explain it while you're shoveling their driveway on Thanksgiving morning and expecting you to be goddamned cheerful about it.
