Live from the Sports Bar

When I was a kid, I could measure out my life in Washington Redskins football games. My dad was a Skins fan, so I absorbed a thrill for one o'clock Sunday from the time I was old enough to know what day it was when I woke up. My week would build to a slow climax until the frenzy of Sunday morning, when I would hop around the house, bouncing off furniture and walls in slow-motion as if they could never tackle me – "look at him, he just won't go down!" – until at 12:30 the sounds of that retrospectively strange creature known as Brent Musberger would come on the screen and say something like, "You are looking live at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia," and I would start slapping my football in excitement.

I remember sitting in government class on a Friday in ninth grade unable to focus on a single word of Mr. Baulsir's lecture about a bicameral legislature, because I couldn't stop thinking about how we'd fare against the mighty Cowboys that week. When Sunday morning finally arrived, it was little different from waking up on Christmas, except where the trees and toys would be was a television on a table, and on the sofa where the guests would gather Dec. 24th were my pops and me, eating Fritos and yelling for our team. A big loss was enough to depress me all Sunday night, so that homework was unthinkable. Sometimes I'd cry after a big game, one that, say, knocked us out of the playoffs. When we finally and suddenly became a good team in 1982, I lived in a kind of perpetual suspicion as to why the universe had suddenly decided to smile on me. I kept thinking it was a cruel joke, that I'd wake up one day and the papers would explain that the whole season was an exhibition.

My dad somehow got one ticket for the championship game against the Cowboys, and he gave it to me. I remember riding the subway to the game with acute fear. For my whole life, the Cowboys had loomed as unbeatable, lords over our ragtag bunch of vassals. Just say the names, even to this day, and I shudder at how they ruled us over the years: Preston Pearson, Too Tall Jones, Harvey Martin, Tony Dorsett. I cringed at the coming slaughter, which would have been one thing through the filter of television, quite another to witness in person. But again, the magnetic fields had inexplicably shifted, and I stood there at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium with fifty-five thousand strangers, high-fiving the black woman on my left and the white man on my right, all of us yelling in shock that we were deposing the kings, giving in to savage Roman glee when Dexter Manley knocked Danny White unconscious, jumping up and down uncontrollably for an hour after the last snap. Then, two weeks later, when we beat the Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII, I ran into the street and tilted my head to the sky and yelled, as if my entire life had been surging toward this pinnacle.

Now, as an adult, with the house sold and my father gone and all the friends and me scattered around the country, there's only one place to go to feel even a faint shudder of football magic: the sports bar. It used to be that when you moved away, the only way to keep tabs on the old team was to check the box score in the paper. Now you can go to large rooms with dozens of TVs and you can pretend you're right back there in your living room. Sports bars subscribe to a satellite link called "NFL Sunday Ticket" that allows them to show all the games they want. It is a temptation I cannot pass up. From the gigantic ESPN Zone in Times Square to a joint in Chicago called Joe's, I have managed to find a little slice of home wherever I am.

There's one problem...