Lights Out: The 2012 Football Season is Over

It’s official.  We have entered the dreaded void between football and baseball.  The minute the confetti began to fly, I felt a pang of sadness knowing that there would be no more meaningful football until September.  That’s a long time!

Plus, this year, we won’t have the thrill of being Super Bowl champions to tide us over.

The Ravens are the champions now, and I admit, I was wrong with my prediction.  I thought the 49ers would edge out Baltimore by four.  Instead, they lost by three, in what was almost the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.

The game was rather boring before the black out.  There is a sentence I never thought I’d write. Super Bowl XLVII will go down in history as the Black-Out Bowl, which happened to feature two head coaches who were related.

It’s amazing how drastically one event can change everything.  Like momentum, it can swing on a fumble, a dropped pass, or a power outage, but time is momentum’s greatest threat.

After the championship games, I was confident that the 49ers would keep on rolling and walk away with the Lombardi Trophy.   Then, I realized that two weeks is a long time for a young team to wait, and, conversely, plenty of time for a veteran team to prepare.

It was obvious that Colin Kaepernick was nervous.  The enormity of the situation got to him, but can we really blame him?  It was, after all, only his 10th NFL start.  He also ran up against a good defense and was the victim of poor play calling.

Kaepernick’s rocket-like arm is certainly a weapon, but it was his legs that were slaying defenses throughout the playoffs.  There may have been some missed calls on their last drive, but why were the 49ers throwing the ball?  Where was the option?  Not giving Kaepernick full use of his arsenal, throughout the game, cost the 49ers their sixth Super Bowl ring and robbed Kaepernick of the opportunity to run in the winning touchdown, which would have certainly clinched him the MVP.

San Francisco also wasted two time-outs and let the Ravens back into the game.  If the defense could have prevented that last Baltimore touchdown, then the outcome would have been very different.  That was the ball game.  It’s all about momentum.

Even though we have to live with the fact that the Baltimore Ravens are World Champions—ugh—at least the black out did not “decide” the outcome of the game.  If it had, someone at the Superdome would have had some serious ‘splainin’ to do, and the rest of us would have had to endure weeks upon weeks of listening to ridiculous conspiracy theories debated on ESPN and talk radio.

Now, this story can die out, and we can focus on more important matters, such as the Giants winning Super Bowl XLVIII at home in a well-lit MetLife Stadium, a day after Michael Strahan is voted into the Hall of Fame.  How incredible would that be?   As I have said many times before, a girl can dream.  We can all dream.