The Living Room Times

The moment of truth has arrived: I’m about to start watching the Fiesta Bowl, roughly 25 hours after kickoff. I was too busy to watch the game last night, so I TiVoed it, and then ever since the game started yesterday, I’ve assiduously avoided Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, e-mail (for the most part), and any news or sports or other websites that might conceivably mention the result. I even changed my browser’s homepage from the Drudge Report to my work e-mail, on the off chance the game might somehow be newsworthy enough to earn a spot on Drudge. And I asked a couple of fellow sports fans at my office not to tell me anything about the game.

This has all been completely successful: I have no idea what happened in the game, who won, whether it was a good game, or anything at all about it. (Well, one co-worker did say “you missed a great game,” but I’m pretty sure he was teasing me and didn’t actually watch the game or have any idea what happened — he’s not really a TCU-Boise State kind of guy. Becky is also making some cryptic comments about how Facebook has been buzzing all day with talk of a punter doing something dramatic, but again, I think she’s yanking my chain… and if she’s not, the possibility that she is is plausible enough that it doesn’t really give anything away. If she’s telling the truth, I won’t know until it happens — er, until I see it happen, that is.)

My self-imposed ignorance, and forswearing of almost the entire Internet for more than a day, is reminiscent of the extreme lengths I went to in order to avoid reading or hearing any spoilers about the ending of the seventh Harry Potter book in the days before it was released. But of course, that was an effort to avoid learning a fictional “fact” that had been “known” to J.K. Rowling for years. In this case, I’m avoiding all information about something that actually happened yesterday. Thus, for me, there’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s Cat phenomenon going on here (hence the title of this post, and my tweet yesterday along the same lines). I haven’t observed the result, thus the quiff hasn’t yet been popped, and thus, until I hit “play” on my TiVo, Boise State both won and lost; TCU likewise both won and lost; the game was both dramatic and boring; the teams looked both BCS-worthy (even perhaps title-worthy?) and mockably not-ready-for-prime-time; etc. etc. (And yes, I realize that’s not actually proper quantum physics, because millions of people did observe the game. Shh. Allow me my nerdy analogy, damn you!)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to “live” blog the game as I watch it on the longest tape delay ever. 🙂 Updates will appear after the jump. Oh, and feel free to post “spoiler” comments — I won’t be reading any comments till after I’m done with the game.

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