Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Or whatever else they were saying back on Dec. 14, 1941.
Surely you’ve heard that date by now, the one attached to Chicago 33, Green Bay 14, the only time in history the Packers and Bears faced off in a playoff game. And because Twitter didn’t exist back then, well, we’re left to more ancient devices to remember the action.
How long ago was it? Long enough that, when they played the game at Wrigley Field, it had only been 33 years since the Cubs won a World Series.
Long enough that Green Bay Press-Gazette writer Ray Pagel sang the praises of center George Svendsen, so writers were still paying attention to centers.
Long enough that, judging by this archived Milwaukee Sentinel, Packers writers still called Green Bay “the Bays.” Which makes me wonder if they called Chicago “the Goes.”
And long enough that, in the those same Sentinel pages, a college coach called his unexpected firing a “Pearl Harbor job,” and nobody demanded that he be fired again for the comment.
Yes, they played that game just seven days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and now, nearly 70 years later, the Packers can finally avenge the loss.
Not that Packers fans have been rallying to the cry of “Remember Wrigley Field” or anything. But when you have to wait seven decades between playoff meetings with your biggest rival, well, you can understand why folks are a little giddy.
Nobody’s been this pumped since Snooki descended in something see-thru.
How do I know it’s a big deal? Well, some Milwaukee Magazine staffers had two main goals on Monday: 1) Work on the next issue, and 2) Make the local Bears fan’s cubicle look like the Packers Hall of Fame.
How else do I know it’s a big deal? How many other matchups send people scrambling for news clippings from 1941? And how many other events could get Appleton radio station WAPL-FM 105.7 to play hourly r
enditions of “The Bears Still Suck” from now until kickoff.
And we’re just getting started. We’ve got five days left for people to get creative. I fear for the lives of every teddy bear in Wisconsin.
Yes, we’re embarking on a week of Packers/Bears hype the likes of which the world has never seen. Somebody’s gonna have to invent a bigger Internet to handle it all. Show the results to someone covering the game 70 years ago and they’d need 70 years of therapy to get over it.
And if we have to wait 70 more years for the next one? Well, God help us all.
And the teddy bears most of all.
NUTSHELLS
–Brett Favre made news on Monday for two reasons.
First he filed retirement papers with the NFL (and yes, I’m still sure this really is it).
Then he told ESPN’s Ed Werder that he not only expects the Packers to win the Super Bowl, but he hopes they will. “I think they will win it all!” Favre said of the Packers in an e-mail to Werder. “I hope they do, if you are wondering.”
Furthermore, Favre lavished praise on Aaron Rodgers, saying he’s the best QB still playing, which would mean Favre prefers Rodgers to Pittsburgh quarterback and two-time Super Bowl winner Ben Roethlisberger.
Is that sound you’re hearing the ice thawing between Green Bay and Kiln, Miss.? Or is it just Brett’s clever ploy to score Super Bowl tickets?
–So where does Marquette go from here?
About the only good news from the aftermath of Saturday’s come-from-ahead 71-70 loss against Louisville is that the Packers took the spotlight off the meltdown. But the fact remains that Marquette held 18-point leads with 6:29 and 5:44 left, only to see Louisville score 26 of the final 33 points.
Just prior to the collapse, I tweeted that I’d seen enough. I was convinced that Marquette – on the strength of a record that included one big win against Notre Dame and another pending against Louisville – deserved to be a top-25 team.
Well clearly, I hadn’t seen enough, and frightened fans begged me to not tweet about the Packers, too.
But the Golden Eagles now face a bigger challenge than my Twitter jinxes. They have to rebound from what may be the most unfathomable loss in Buzz Williams’ largely successful tenure. They have to make sure that a bad six minutes doesn’t become a bad season altogether.
Marquette has shown it can play with the best teams in America this year. It’s also shown how far it is from being a complete team.
Now comes the chance to show off its resilience.
–Speaking of struggling basketball teams in the midst of season-defining stretches, meet the Milwaukee Bucks. Because since Dec. 15, Milwaukee has dropped 11 of its 15 games.
You’ll find plenty of reasons why the Bucks aren’t living up to their preseason expectations. Chief among them are a difficult schedule and enough injuries that even the Packers are sympathetic.
But this is supposed to be the part where things get better. They’re getting healthier now, with the notable exception of Brandon Jennings, and the most difficult part of the schedule is behind them.
Still, they’ve just lost to Philadelphia and Houston, the kind of lower-tier teams against whom the Bucks must start making up ground. Monday afternoon’s loss to Houston left the Bucks at 14-24, the furthest below .500 they’ve been all season.
Milwaukee’s season isn’t lost yet, but it’s being lost. From now until Feb. 14, the Bucks will play 16 times, and only two of those opponents own a winning record
That makes the mandate simple: Play better basketball now, or play with pingpong balls in June.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as howiemag. And tune in every Tuesday morning at 6:30 when I join Doug Russell and Mike Wickett on SportsRadio 1250 AM for Tuesdays with Howie.
