The Weirdest, Wildest Super Bowl

By LYNN ZINSER, NY Times 5th Down Blog, February 4 ,2013  

 

 

 

When Ray Lewis finally stops preening for the cameras, Jim Harbaugh stops bellowing for a holding call and people finally run out of lights-out jokes, this Super Bowl will find its rightful place in the pantheon of Super Bowls as the strangest one ever:

•  It started out as a Ravens romp,
• featured a halftime show that could have been seen from space had the Superdome not been a dome, and
• then became a combination of social commentary on the failing state of our infrastructure and slapstick comedy drawn from the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. 

Oh, and then the 49ers nearly charged back and won the thing until their play-callers lost their senses and Harbaugh the younger lost his marbles and Joe Flacco pierced the nation’s airspace with a perfectly timed profanity. 



Other than that, not much happened. How did you spend your Sunday night? 



Yes, this Super Bowl was one for the ages, although perhaps the Dark Ages. There was Baltimore’s preacher-in-residence, Lewis, thanking God even though he was 5 yards away from cursing God’s itchy light-switch finger. There was CBS stumbling through a broadcast perhaps saved by Jim Nantz and Phil Simms’s being blacked out for a while, so the sideline reporter Steve Tasker could make sense of things, as Richard Deitsch writes on SI.com. 


There was a 49ers-patented comeback, a Jim Harbaugh-patented tantrum, a near miraculous championship debut from Colin Kaepernick and a tough night for the Harbaugh family that didn’t actually depend on which way this came out. 

If you’re wondering, there still is no explanation for the blackout, the power company Entergy releasing a statement that essentially says it has no clue. It did spawn a surreal scene, as Greg Garber writes on ESPN.com, that did get back to being a football game 34 minutes later, albeit one forever altered, as Michael Rosenberg writes on SI.com.  



In the end, the 49ers’ comeback fell just short. Ravens defensive coordinator Dean Pees dialed up the perfect blitz, as Les Carpenter describes on Yahoo.com, the referees held their breath instead of blowing their whistles as San Francisco’s Michael Crabtree watched the ball sail over his head and Kaepernick realized he had fallen 5 yards short of hero territory, as Ann Killion writes in The San Francisco Chronicle.


Mike Pereira, the former head of N.F.L. officiating, writes on Foxsports.com that the no-call was correct, and Tim Kawakami writes in The San Jose Mercury News that Kaepernick will be back to try this again. He certainly handled the turn of events better than his coach, Mike Freeman writes on CBSSports.com. And 49ers fans will be left scratching their heads over the plays the 49ers called at the end, Kaepernick’s dangerous legs held in check when they could have scrambled him into legend. Maybe the best team didn’t win, as Mark Purdy writes in The San Jose Mercury News, but as the Ravens showed again, the hottest team usually does, Clark Judge writes on CBSSports.com. 



The loudest linebacker did win, although even the superego vortex that is Ray Lewis would have to admit he was but a role player in all of this, as Don Banks writes on SI.com. 



No, the Ravens were most definitely Flacco’s team, as Ashley Fox writes on ESPN.com, but Lewis will be remembered for hanging on for his fitting end, Childs Walker writes in The Baltimore Sun.
In the end, the Harbaughs struggled with how to balance the happy son with the crushed one, as Dan Wetzel describes on Yahoo.com, the Har-Bowl always destined to be bittersweet. 



It wasn’t, however, destined to be this weird. No, that was New Orleans’s contribution to the whole affair.  



As the writer Neal Pollock wrote on Twitter — which was the comedy center of the universe for 34 blacked-out minutes —  “This time, it’s the rich people trapped in the Superdome.” Next year’s Super Bowl — yes, that’s you, metropolitan New York — has its work cut out for it. Locusts, anyone?