Well, that could have gone better . . .

There's not much to say about the sad events of last night, but there must be some useful lesson of mortality . . . flying too close to the sun? . . . Anyway, the TV set was switched off from the second Brady's last pass fell incomplete, and I'll be officially sports-free until Easter. I don't need to hear any analysis to tell me what happened or to try to re-live it. I will say that the moment Eli Manning completed that impossible play in which he got away from two or three enormous guys, threw a crazy pass downfield and had it caught miraculously off a helmet - well, the Giants seemed destined to win from then on. It may well go down as the greatest Super Bowl ever, but that's little consolation. Avoiding sports radio and the like for these last two days before Lent will actually make me happier, so in order to counteract that potential enjoyment of abstinence, I also resolved to give up donuts starting today instead of Wednesday. Now that's a sacrifice.

I tried to break free of despair immediately last night by popping in an episode of the great Dick Van Dyke Show - about as escapist as possible, and always entertaining. Usually I'd be half asleep at the end of a half-hour, but in this case it took much longer to get to sleep, reliving the five or six moments when the Patriots almost put the game away. Still, the truth is I'm not that heartbroken. The Patriots have won three Super Bowls in the past decade and the Red Sox have won two World Series. This game doesn't even remotely compare to the horror of 2003 when Aaron Boone's homerun . . . Oh, why linger on such things?

So, this morning, it was nothing but music on the ride up (including the amazingly sexy duet between Nerone and Poppea in L'incoronazione di Poppea (prep for a class)) - and then an early morning swim. I've tended to be horrible about exercise in the non-summer months, so I'm going to try to get to school early a few days a week to see if this works. Hitting the indoor pool on a freezing morning was remarkably refreshing, and it cleared my mind of football better than Rob and Laura Petrie.

If nothing else, I may be one of the few bloggers to have gotten football, Lent, the Dick Van Dyke Show, and Monteverdi into one post . . .