In the midst of the worst weather in recent memory, Super Bowl XLV went forward unimpeded as it was played at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, an indoor venue and home to the Texas Cowboys, who as it turned out, weren’t using it this weekend. The Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers squared off a few minutes early on Sunday, hoping to distract viewers from the mangling of the Star Spangled Banner by pop star Christina Aguilera, who sang something about “the glare of red sockets” before being hustled off the field by security agents.
From the moment of the initial kick off it was apparent that one of these closely matched teams was going to win. Ted Stereford, a fan who had waited overnight outside the stadium, hoping to snag a ticket from a scalper agreed. “One of these teams is sure to win,” he said, during a pregame interview of fans who were evenly divided as to which side would emerge the victor. There were a few lively brawls between opposing fans before the game, but only two fatalities were reported.
With one of the teams pulling ahead at half time, there was a welcome pause in the tension as the Black Eyed Peas took the stage to perform musical numbers purposely neutral to both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to avoid turning the event into a good natured celebration of Second Amendment rights, as happened in Tucson last month. Texas Governor Rick Perry, speaking from his second tier box seat, noted that the Super Bowl was a welcome distraction from the state’s recently revealed $25 billion deficit that had been kept under wraps by deft accounting manuevers and an influx of federal stimulus funds. “Turns out we needed those devil dollars from the Feds after all,” said Perry, “I guess seceding from the Union will have to wait until next year.”
Perhaps the most unsettling occurrence of this Sunday’s game was the unseating of over 400 ticket holders at Cowboy Stadium through a mixup with one of the Super Bowl vendors. A seemingly minor misspelling on a fax sent to a sanitation firm had workmen scrambling just before the game to install over a thousand toilets on one side of the stadium. Organizers had taken the spelling of “Super Bowel Sunday” literally, and had removed fans’ seats and replaced them with toilets, which met with howls of protest as ticket holders, who had spent thousands of dollars to see the game were told they’d have to move to a hastily contrived theater to watch their teams on a big screen TV, since the toilets were not properly bolted down and therefore unsafe.
Once the game resumed the team that had fallen behind swiftly made some gains owing to superior passing and receiving in the final two minutes of play. But on the fourth down one of the quarterbacks threw a long pass to his standout receiver, who promptly dropped the ball, thereby losing any chance at being signed to a multi-million dollar product endorsement contract. With only seconds to go, a final touchdown was achieved giving the winning team a perfectly good reason to celebrate, and Super Bowl XLV was brought to a close.