Football Games

Yesterday was the Super Bowl, where the best teams form the two leagues meet to battle for bragging rights to who is the best of all. There is usually a team that is favored to win and another that is expected to lose. So many times though the team that is the underdog will win and win big. So what happens, do the people giving the odds not have a clue what they are doing? Or is their something else going on?

Perhaps there is no way to predict the spirit and determination of the people playing? Sports have a way of imitating real life and that's why we love our sports, both watching and playing. Throughout history the underdog has proved that through the power of it's spirit that if you want it bad enough you can overcome seemingly impossible odds.

The United States is a prime example of how a group of people with a dream and a fighting spirit can beat the odds. Our rag tag army of farmers and businessmen took on the most powerful nation and the invincible war machine of the British Empire and won their freedom. History is filled with such stories. The mighty Mexican army was stopped stone cold by a small Garrison of warriors at the Alamo, our own version of the 300 Spartan warriors that became the inspiration to the Greeks and gave them the grit to overcome certain defeat.

We are, most of us anyway, not warriors facing an advancing army or a team taking the field of honor. But we are all of us warriors of life, we go to battle everyday, carving out a life for ourselves and our families. We have to do this by a set of rules set out by our societies. But can through our sports live by our own rules. We can decide what risks we are willing to take, we can decide how far we will push our comfort zones.

When we train for races like the half and the full marathons, we decide we are going to take the risks. We decide how much we are willing to suffer and how much we are going to sacrifice. We decide how tough we can be. We decide that "Hell Yes We Can". We might start out carrying a lot of fluff or we are horridly out of shape, but we decide that we are going the distance and nothing is going to stand in our way.

Last month we gathered by the thousands to face conditions that would have most people thinking we had lost our mind. Maybe we had, but it was our decision. We chose to stop watching from the sidelines and get in the game. We decided that we were what was happening, and we decided we didn't give a rat's whisker of the risks we were going to win our freedom. Our freedom to choose our risks and overcome them.

Thanks for reading.

Rambling Panda