A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

It wasn’t a dream

// January 12th, 2009 // family

I woke up this morning and turned on the radio. What I heard shocked me. The events that happened this weekend were apparently not a dream.

The Arizona Cardinals will play in the NFC Championship and they’ll do it from Glendale.

All day yesterday, at church, at home, on Facebook, on Twitter…everyone was rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles so that we could play this huge game at home. Well, it worked. And since the game was at home, we were determined to get some tickets.

At 3pm they went on sale. Ticketmaster was slow as mud. I tried to get 8 @ $120 because we had 6 definites and a potential arrival from Jina’s parents to take the other two. No dice. I tried 6. No good. 4? Nope. 2? Nope.

30 minutes later I was still trying. Little did I know that the game was sold out in SIX MINUTES.

So now instead of going, we’ll have a big party at the house. And that may be just as fun (not to mention a lot cheaper).

The big question is, can the Cardinals win this weekend? I for one am fairly excited just to be here. I think if we lose and it’s a good, hard-fought game…I’ll be okay with it.

But I want to WIN. And I think we can. Two reasons come to mind:

The first is that we are very good at home. Our stadium is loud. Ron Wolfly from KTAR went to dinner with Keith Brookings of the Atlanta Falcons on Friday, our first victim in the playoffs. Keith said the stadium was so loud because they must PIPE-IN crowd noise over the speakers. Wolf was like…uhh…no they don’t. That’s the fans.

Keith couldn’t believe it. Yes…the place rocks…it’s loud and opposing teams have a tough time hearing snap counts, resulting in false starts and other misques.

Think about how loud it will be this Sunday.

And second…motivation. When they played Atlanta, a columnist in that town basically wrote something like “The Falcons got sooo lucky to have the Cards as their first round opponent. They couldn’t have WISHED for  a better scenario.”

That fired the team up. And it happened again last week when no one thought they stood a chance at Carolina. Ken Whisenhunt used anything he could to get these guys mad. And dang if it didn’t work again.

Now this week is here. And I’d like to thank Mr. Sheridan from the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning for the first nugget of annoyance to get under the Cards’ skin this week.

The impossible suddenly looks probable. After requiring a miracle just to sneak into the playoffs, the Eagles are two very manageable wins from retracing the Phillies’ parade route.

They will play in their fifth NFC championship game in eight years this Sunday in Arizona. There is nothing about the Cardinals or the AFC finalists, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, as imposing as the New York Giants at the Meadowlands.

By beating the defending Super Bowl champions, 23-11, in a brutal game yesterday, the Eagles cleared the highest hurdle between themselves and their first NFL championship since 1960.

….

The hardest part of the job is done.

Highest hurdle? The hardest part is done? It’s like the guy hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been going on. And that’s fine with me. Keep overlooking this Arizona team, that’s just the way they like it.