The Super Bowl Could Not Compete With Tape-Delayed Olympic Curling

Nobody else in my house likes football, and we are believers in democracy at least as far as concerns the television. And so it was that, Sunday evening, I had the Super Bowl streaming on my li'l laptop screen, and the gigantic TV was showing a tape-delayed CNBC broadcast of mixed doubles curling at the Milano Cortina Olympics.

I feel (but do not really have) a professional obligation to watch the NFL conference championships and Super Bowl, but an odd pattern developed at some point in the first quarter: The curling was stealing my attention away. It started in the commercial breaks, when I'd mute the stream to avoid the ads and the curling would catch my eye, and I'd miss a couple minutes of the game before I remembered I was trying to watch it and not tape-delayed curling. But there were so incredibly many commercial breaks, because the teams kept going three-and-out. The curling (thrilling, dramatic, from 12 hours in the past) would distract me for two minutes beyond the end of one commercial break, and I'd go "Oh shit, I'm missing the game!" and I'd pull the stream back up on my laptop and NBC would already be breaking for commercials again. And the curling (nerds with brooms having a sweeping contest) would sink its fiendish teeth back into my feeble attention span.

Americans Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin were going against Swedish siblings Isabella and Rasmus Wranå. The Swedish sister, Isabella, was wearing huge boxy eyeglasses and looked like an 8-year-old and was impossibly adorable; Dropkin, in turn, is far handsomer than curling calls for. The pairs' playing styles seemed to contrast: The Swedes would ease their stone slowly and delicately down the lane, playing for maximum precision and placement, and then Dropkin would send a stone rocketing along at freeway speeds and blast the Swedes' stones to hell. This struck me as an extremely apt representation of the respective nations' bearings in the world today, which, combined with Isabella's glasses, made it pretty much impossible to root for the Americans.

But then the fourth throw of the eighth and final end came around. With the score tied 7-7 and the Americans holding the hammer, the Swedes had a guard and two stones in the house, spaced pretty well and sitting in front of two American stones. Dropkin called timeout to take a closer look and decide how to play it, then sent another one of those cruise missiles screaming down the ice, where it took out all three of the Swedish stones and left them with nothing in the house. I yelped; Dropkin screamed and gesticulated like he'd just slain Helgi Hundingsbane. The Swedes were cooked: With only two stones left to throw, all they could control was where in the house the American hammer would end up after it sent their last stone sliding away. That one throw by Dropkin, incredible entirely on its own, had also been spectacularly clutch: It had for all practical purposes sealed the pair's trip to the mixed doubles semifinal.

At this point, I realized that I hadn't even checked on the Super Bowl in like 13 straight minutes. Feeling ashamed of myself, I yanked my eyes down to my laptop screen and turned the sound up loud, hoping to really nail my attention to the game. It was third-and-1; Drake Maye threw an incomplete pass, his 2,119th in a row, and the Patriots sent out the punt unit. I glanced up at the TV and saw Italy's Stefania Constantini, the breakout star of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, in my mind if perhaps not in reality something like the Serena Williams of curling. The Italians—Stefania and the lankily good-looking Amos Mosaner, mixed doubles champs at the '22 Games—were about to (half a day earlier) take on the red-hot Great Britain team of Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat!

The discovery of this fact—that CNBC was about to air a rerun of a curling match, the outcome of which I could learn in 10 seconds by googling "Italy Britain mixed doubles curling result"—was roughly one zillion times more exciting than anything that had happened in the actual football-game part of the Super Bowl to that point. You simply cannot expect someone to watch a live broadcast of the Super Bowl when they could equally watch a tape-delayed showing of a non-elimination match in a bizarre arctic pastime they hardly understand! Grudgingly I looked back down at my laptop; New England coach Mike Vrabel was belatedly trying to show Maye how to throw the football with one hand instead of two. Several seconds later, he was strip-sacked deep in his own territory and the Seahawks recovered. They'd kicked so many field goals by this point that I half-expected them to just skip straight to that part, but they sent their offense out instead.

Meanwhile, the Brits were giving Stefania total hell! A few throws into the second end, their stones were tightly packed amid the Italians'; the reigning Olympic champs could not hope to dislodge the Brits without blowing up their own arrangement. All the Italians could do was stand there like dopes while Mouat, with the sixth throw, coolly knocked their stones out of the house; the Brits took a ludicrous three points in that frame alone. Down on the hated wasteland of my laptop screen, Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold was tossing an easy-looking touchdown pass to AJ Barner to make Seattle's lead effectively ∞-0. The Patriots had done almost literally nothing at all with the ball to that point in the game. In our company Slack channel, my poor coworkers were documenting their misery in various ughs and this suckses, because they—the fools, the poor suckers—were watching the single biggest sporting event of the year instead of an hours-old rerun of a curling match whose loser would not be eliminated.

The curling was (old but) electrifying! Each side took a single point from its next hammer round, but the Brits stole a point in the fifth despite Italy holding the hammer, and now the Italians seemed in real trouble; this was the equivalent of a late service break in tennis. (In the Super Bowl, Drake Maye made two consecutive good throws, the first and second of his life; the latter was a beautiful arcing long ball to Mack Hollins's outside shoulder for a 35-yard touchdown; the extra point made the score This Game Was Over 40 Minutes Ago-7.) Mouat blew Great Britain's fourth throw of the sixth frame, allowing Mosaner to slide a preposterous fourth Italian stone into the middle of the house; Dodds knocked a couple of them out with the Brits' final throw of the frame, but only a couple, and her stone ricocheted too far out to block Stefania's access. She nestled the hammer up against Italy's two remaining stones in the middle, and the Italians took a whopping three points from the frame.

I thought it was over, like the Super Bowl had been since halftime. In strict terms, it was, having concluded many hours earlier on Sunday. But no! It was not over! Britain's seventh frame was a real ass-kicking: Spreading the action out and betting everything on their ability to clear the Italians' stones out of the house, they got a double take-out on the sixth throw, survived Mosaner's attempted double on the seventh, and played the numbers from there, ending up with three of their stones in the house against zero for the Italians. The drama! Consecutive three-point frames late in the ... match? I have no idea whether that is normal in curling or not, but it definitely is not.

I have to confess: I really didn't get what was going on in the eighth and final frame. The Brits kept zooming their own stones to nowhere; by the fifth throw, the Italians had three stones barely inside the house and the British had a center guard and nothing. With the fifth throw, Mouat came through with yet another double take-out; after the seventh, the Brits had one stone in the house and each side had a high central guard. When Mosaner slid the eighth throw tidily into the green circle, pretty well protected by the Italians' guard stone, I thought the Brits were up against it. I glanced down at my laptop around this time and Maye was getting exploded into giblets by three Seahawks, one of whom plucked the ball out of the air and ran it back for a touchdown, which was basically the entirety of the Super Bowl in microcosm.

Dodds's ninth throw, Britain's last of the night, was a beaut: She rocked Britain's guard stone like, I dunno, a long way back, several "metres" as they call them, where it took out Mosaner's stone in the green circle and left the Italians, once again, with nothing in the house. The precision of this throw was amazing: Dodds had to hit her own guard stone at just the right angle that would send it at Mosaner's rock, and with enough power that when the guard stone got to Mosaner's, it would knock that rock all the way out of the house—but not too much power, because Dodds needed that guard stone to then stay in the house itself, or else Stefania would be able to just slide the hammer to the middle of that sucker and walk it off. As it was, she left Stefania with a rough setup: One British stone in the house, well protected by a tricky pair of guards up high, and the whole match on the line.

And then Stefania frickin' blew it! I have watched her curl like four times ever, and let me tell you something, buddy: Stefania doesn't blow it! But she blew it. It was, as the commentator said, a "circus shot" attempt, but the final stone accomplished nothing more than a totally fruitless grazing of Italy's guard stone. The Super Bowl had ended a few minutes earlier, I think. I looked down at my laptop and saw a graphic showing that Maye had 295 passing yards, and snorted in derision: By my estimate, 235 of those came after the game was for all practical purposes over, like the curling had been since lunchtime.

Italy and the United States are curling at each other right now, in a separate browser tab from where I am typing this. I can hear the audio, but I can't watch. It's fine! I will watch it later.