(A post-Super Bowl follow-up to the pre-Superbowl “How to Survive Living in a City Going To Its 2nd Super Bowl in a Row When You Don’t Care About Football: An Epiphany“.)

“Let’s go all “Whos in Whoville” and have a parade anyway,” says a friend so I ask her a question about the Worst. Call. Ever. without calling it the Worst. Call. Ever. But it’s too soon still, still too soon.

In public, in Seattle, it will always be too soon.

The frissons of that 30-second drive across the football table into the score space and that great catch by the guy who was spinning on his butt at the time are past and the utter confounditry of the halftime show has been relegated to memes.The commercials with horses rescuing puppies (aww) on behalf of a hot farmer and beer, girls throwing ‘like a girl‘ (yay!) on behalf of maxi-pads, and dead children (seriously, what the hell?) on behalf of an insurance company I’m sure not running out to use — all are distant memories now.

But though the respite is here, though I have some months of freedom ahead from having cups of the blue/green Kool-Aid shoved daily into my hand, I know the 12th man will—like Christmas carols in malls on Labor Day, like 70s mustaches, like the flu, like awful summer humidity—rise again.

In the weeks leading up to defeat snatched from the jaws of victory I kept accidentally wearing blue and green (I have a blue raincoat). What was it Nietzsche said about things that don’t destroy you? Who was it who said resistance is futile?. This post is, I just realized, my hundred and…twelfth…