Monday Night Football...the experience

I had the good fortune to attend three sporting events in person in the past month plus. The first happened on the Monday night after Thanskgiving when my friend Steve invited me to join him for the Carolina Panthers/Tampa Bay Buccaneers game (I benefitted from an 8:30 start time because it was too late for his elementary aged son to stay up!). Both teams were 9 and 3 at the time and the atmosphere was electric. I enjoy the NFL a lot, but the fan experience is usually a bit lacking compared to the pomp and circumstance of college games. Not on that night. Knowing that the divsion title and playoffs would be a lot easier to achieve with a victory the energy in the stadium was at a high level all night. Quaterback Jake Delhomme has a silly local cell phone commercial in which he muses about seats should be called seats they should be called "sit occassionalies". Well the whatever-you-choose-to call-thems must have been the coldest things in the stadium because the entire crowd stood for at least 90 percent of the game. Running backs Deangelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart ran up and down and all around and it led to a big Panthers win...a few weeks later a division title and first round bye were secured and Tampa did not win another game. The fans had a sense of the moment. To finish it off their aren't too many people I know who can say they live in walking distance of an NFL stadium, so I walked home intoxicated by the experience (and the Coke I drank during the game).