Hail Mary
Mario Milosevic
Published by Green Snake Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright (c) 2012 by Mario Milosevic
Cover image copyright (c) by Richard Sweeney | Dreamstime.com
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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Hail Mary
Mario Milosevic
CLARICE WAS AN early adaptor when it came to football. She gave up church on Sundays when the games got scheduled early. She had to be there in the living room watching the games. There was really no choice in the matter.
She liked to say that Super Bowl Sunday was the closest thing the country had to a national day of religious observance, so it was okay to give up church. It was, in fact, the patriotic and right thing to do on Super Bowl Sunday. It was the only time (except for starting wars) that most of the country got together on an issue.
Clarice did pray before and during each game. Didn’t everyone?
Clarice’s husband Grant enjoyed a good football game as much as anyone else, but unlike Clarice, he did not invest in the Full Contact VR Body Suit when it came out a few years earlier. He was not interested in experiencing the game to quite the extent that Clarice did. The Full Contact VR Body Suit was a virtual reality piece of clothing that resembled a metallic bag. It gave wearer/users like Clarice the feeling of being in the game. It was electronically connected to the player of her choice and when that player threw a pass, she felt it in her arms. When that player got hit by a linebacker, she felt it in her body and even got the sensation of her brain getting knocked about in a bell-ringer moment.
Later, when the Cyberspace Titans became the first team to do away with coaches and managers and moved to crowd-sourcing for its plays, Clarice was there. She loved voting on what the team should do next. She groaned when she was out-voted and the Titans were forced to go for it on a fourth down with inches to go when she knew the right thing was to punt. She loved it when she voted for a Hail Mary pass and the majority of the rest of her co-managers agreed and the actual quarterback on the field threw the Hail Mary pass and it worked. Nothing in the world came close to the elation Clarice felt during those moments.
So now, today, a mere sixty years after the first Super Bowl, with the Cyberspace Titans playing the Toronto Crystals (one of the few teams that still had a real life coach) on Super Bowl Sunday in Miami, the first great contest between cyberspace and meatspace was about to commence and Clarice was not going to be left out.
Clarice had donned her cybersuit days earlier and made sure all the connections were there, in place and working properly. She plugged into the quarterback during his practice sessions and noticed a slight anomaly in his knee. Not enough to cause her real concern, but as she tagged along with the quarterback’s daily routines, it was definitely noticeable. She immediately contacted her co-managers, all three million of them, and got back a consensus that they would have to be watching this particular player. A quarterback with a bum knee was not the best way to win the biggest game of the year.
Scratch that. The biggest game of the century.
Grant observed his wife’s obsession in the days before the game with a certain amount of detached amusement. To him, the Super Bowl was a mildly entertaining diversion. To his wife, it was the ultimate contest between the stick-in-the-muds who insisted on tradition, and the forward thinkers who wanted to take football to the people and keep it there.