by Kevin Burton
I don’t know what that was last Sunday, but it was something, and it was personal.
Was it a self-boycott, playing hooky, a tantrum ( I am good at those)?
I guess it was the fantasy football version of the line “I’m just tired and bored with myself” from my favorite Bruce Springsteen tune, “Dancing In the Dark.”
Here’s how it played out. Not yesterday, but last Thursday, Nov. 30, Seattle played Dallas in Thursday Night football. Because they had been playing poorly of late, I benched all my Seattle assets. So I was not playing wide receiver DK Metcalf when he exploded for 134 yards and three touchdowns.
That was 34.4 fantasy points sitting on my bench. When one player scores that much, it usually wins the week for that manager. But not when you don’t play the player.
Metcalf had a 73-yard touchdown in the first quarter that told me immediately I had made a mistake. My reaction, as he continued to pile up the points, was visceral.
It made me want to quit the whole exercise.
Worse, that particular fun-and-games failure reminded me of my real-life failures of late. I thought, who needs fantasy? It’s just another thing I can screw up.
Sitting Metcalf meant potentially blowing a winnable game for a 6-6 team fighting for a playoff spot. And this was Thursday, three days away from the rest of the games. Three days to chew on it.
Getting that worked up about a mathematical sports game was profoundly silly. I call fantasy my “seasonal obsession.” In that moment though, it was making me sick.
So I quit sort of. Oh, I did manage my five teams (don’t judge) that week. But I didn’t watch the first two tiers of games. Usually on an NFL Sunday I am in the recliner, TV on, clicker shifting me determinedly between games, watching my fantasy assets succeed or fail, giving Jeannette updates on how everything is going.
I don’t know if Jeannette rolls her eyes as I breathlessly give these updates. That’s because A, I can’t see well enough and B, I would never risk taking my eyes off the screen for a few seconds, making sure all is well with my players.
I wish when she rolled her eyes it would make a sound, like the sound my phone makes when I get a text.
But Sunday I said good-bye to all that, at least for the first two games. I did watch the late game, Kansas City versus Green Bay.
From noon to 7 pm, I was determined to make some progress in real life. I edited three blogs to use this week and next week. I made substantial progress on my mother’s belongings, steering some of them back to her in her new place, some of them to us, some of them to a secondhand store. That latter is hard to quantify but after my football-ignoring time and efforts, I felt like there was some chance that my garage and living spaces could be restored to normalcy, sometime soon.
Blogs and clutter, those were my main area of progress, but I worked in a few other things.
As I walked away from fantasy Sunday, fantasy pursued me, in the form of text updates that look like “Touchdown! So and so ran for nine yards and scored.” I erased such messages without reading them, making a vague calculation that hey, there sure have been a lot of these, so things must be going OK.
So my team that has DK Metcalf is called the K&J Moondogs. All the teams have K&J for Kevin and Jeannette. The Moondogs part is named after Alan Freed, the influential and unfairly vilified disc jockey who was essentiality hounded to death over the payola scandal. His first show in Cleveland was called the Moondog show.
As it turned out, my Moondogs won their game by 61 points, despite my Metcalf miscalculation. There was literally no combination of players I could have used that would not have won that week.
My best move would have been to ditch the anxiety altogether. But my most Kev-like move would have been to shift the anxiety to the K&J Sonics, who did lose a winnable game because I didn’t play Miami running back De’Von Achane.
But even the Sonics are still in playoff position, if they win this week and next.
So anyway, I eventually saved my mental health AND my fantasy health. My K&J Midnight Runners (named after Dexy’s Midnight Runners who sang my all-time favorite song, “Come On Eileen”) clinched a playoff spot two weeks ago and are cruising.
It may be possible that I can get a fantasy championship and get a life. Stay tuned.
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