Football Is Over, or Seahawks-Packers Was Really Good

In hindsight, everything that happened before the fourth quarter of the NFC title game was necessary. Every break, every bounce, was required to set up the payoff. Russell Wilson had to be wretched to be just good enough at the end. Marshawn Lynch's golden shoes had to be a source of controversy. The Seahawks had to come out in a stupor. The Packers had to fail to punish the Seahawks for their disastrous start.

In hindsight, Mike McCarthy had to lay up. Twice faced with a 4th and goal at the Seattle one, Mike McCarthy twice settled for chip-shot field goals. The Packers, seeing their opponents in a stupor, quietly took the points for fear of waking up the Seahawks. For a while, it looked as if the Packers might pull off the heist, could not just walk, but tiptoe into and through Mordor. But those phantom points, the two touchdowns not scored in Act I, hung over the game as subtly as a bazooka.

In hindsight, when Chekhov's anti-tank weapon finally went off in Act IV, we had been waiting for it all day. McCarthy's too-conservative early strategy came back and blew a hole in his team's season. A gimpy Aaron Rodgers and the suddenly bankable Mason Crosby bailed enough water to get Green Bay into overtime, but the Packers had no chance.

In hindsight, the Packers were always the protagonist of a driver's ed film. Their assigned role was to get mangled by fate. In hindsight, we saw the crash coming the whole time.

In hindsight, the turnovers, slow starts, missed opportunities, undue caution all had to happen. It was all part of the set-up.

Conference championship Sunday is the real end of the NFL season. We won't get two games that matter on a single day until August. The Super Bowl's black hole of hype will turn Seahawks vs. Patriots inside out and blast it into a million pieces. What comes out the other side of the tesseract won't necessarily resemble a football game.

Of course, the conference title bouts (or any NFL game, or really any event related to the NFL) hardly starved for attention. But compared to the Super Bowl, a nuclear weapons test seems quiet. On this last Sunday of football-as-football, before football-as-cultural-aneurysm, we said our goodbyes to the season that was.

2014 was a terrible year for the NFL. The league's maladroit handling of multiple scandals raised a stink bad enough to briefly distract from the buttery scent of massive corporate profits. Big-ticket corporate sponsors hesitated briefly before reaching for their wallets. Chronic brain injuries continued to haunt the sport--former greats took their own lives and youth participation declined. The product on the field often curdled into unwatchable stop-and-go crap, despite rule tweaks to keep offenses rolling.

But actually, 2014 was a wonderful year for the NFL. Ratings stayed stratospheric. The scandals didn't stop anyone from watching. No sponsors bailed. If Americans are overly worried about concussions and brain trauma, they haven't let on. Rule tweaks have produced the most offense in league history. CBS will pay the league $300 million for the right to air eight crappy Thursday night games next year.

The reason we put up with the NFL is because the players in those NFL uniforms are magical. They possess the power of braiding time, space, sublime physicality, and human frailty into an intoxicant. Even Marshawn Lynch grabbing his crotch attained a degree of poignancy. That's when you know it's good football. This NFC title game was the type of game that the term "instant classic" was invented to describe, the kind of game that serves as a filament to electrify and connect an entire country.

The NFL's current copyright bumper plays with this very idea. As the credo of copyright is intoned-any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited-we see the Earth from space at night. Twinkling lights show us the cities, large and small, in which groups of diverse, photogenic Americans gather to enjoy corporate snacks around life-giving televisions. As the globe majestically spins, we see that we are sending ourselves a message. The message is the NFL logo, bringing us all together. Together we are making the football.

That's the intended message, anyway. But from a different perspective, the NFL can look more like a giant bioluminescent space leech, clamped onto the Great Plains and sucking like hell. It looks like the worst possible rash a continent can contract. This is not an entirely unfair characterization of the NFL. The league may function like a monopoly, the only firm selling a product that most of us want desperately, but it's not a monopoly. We're all free to play flag football, to toss a pigskin around with the kids, or just look away, look anywhere else.

The real problem with the NFL circa now is not monopoly, but monopsony. The NFL is the only buyer for world-class football talent, the only institution that can connect the operatic athletic brilliance of a game like Sunday's with our hungry eyeballs. The NFL has insinuated itself between us and pro football. We could look away, but can we really live without games like Seahawks-Packers? In hindsight, the NFL seems inevitable.