Karma's a bitch, bitchez!

Not to get all John Cole on you with football posts on a Sunday, but this has to be karmic payback for the Giants, who made an agreement this week with the Miami Dolphins to allow the Dolphins to come in a day early and use the Giants' training facility so that they could become acclimated to the colder weather (presumably reducing the Jets' so-called "weather advantage":

The roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis deflated early Sunday morning, leaving the scheduled football game between the Minnesota Vikings and Giants – which had already been postponed from Sunday to Monday because of the weekend blizzard – in further limbo.

The National Football League scrambled Sunday morning to determine where the game would be played. Late Saturday night, the game was delayed because of concerns that the snow on the dome roof could not safely be cleared by workers in high winds.

Metrodome officials said they found tears in the roof on Sunday and that it was unlikely they could prepare the dome in time for a game on Monday.

Bill Lester, the executive director of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, said the dome suffered damage to two of its triangle-shaped Teflon panels and that his crew was still assessing the situation.

The N.F.L. could move the football game to someplace like the University of Minnesota’s outdoor football stadium, although it too would have to be cleared of 17 inches of snow.

That could present further problems for the Giants, whose flight was diverted Saturday to Kansas City when snow closed the Minneapolis airport. Anticipating an indoor game, they likely did not bring cold weather gear to Minneapolis.

Nothing to be ashamed of

Or, if you prefer, "Nothing of which to be ashamed."

And so the Jets go home, and the Colts go to the Super Bowl. Here's what it's come to at Casa la Brilliant lately: Both of us arrived home so completely and utterly spent on Friday, between workload and despondency over the Supreme Court and the final nail in the coffin of Air America, that the ONLY thing we could think of to get excited about was the possibility that the upstart little team from the Meadowlands just might be able to pull it off and play in that awful game that's punctuated by sexist ads for beer, soda, junk food, and girls pulling off their tops for GoDaddy.

That's when things are at a truly sorry pass.

But a couple of decent nights of sleep will change your outlook, and so by the time it became clear (really by halftime, when the lead had shrunk to a miserly three points) that the Colts were starting to wake up, we realized it was not to be...and we were OK with that. This was a good thing, because once Shonn Green left the game, it was pretty well over, and I'm just glad that the game didn't go on another quarter or it might have turned into one of those laughable blowouts. But still...only four teams go to the championship games and there's no shame in being a team that was never thought to make a serious run, play a superlative first half and then succumb to Peyton Manning, and then have to go home.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for Mark Sanchez to go home from what turned out to be a surprising rookie season without a tickertape parade. Star athletes can easily turn into seriously self-destructive assholes given too much success too soon. (See also: Dwight Gooden, Tiger Woods, etc.) Because the kid will be OK. The kid can play in New York. He played a surprisingly effective first half against one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, and that's no small potatoes.

This year the Jets provided New York sports fans with a little of that scrappy-team excitement that we really haven't seen since the 1969 Mets. The Yankees are a finely-honed corporate machine, the Mets are the most loathsome organization in baseball at this point, the Giants are EXPECTED to excel with Peyton's Kid Brother at the helm, who cares about hockey, and the less said about the Knicks and Nets this year, the better.

These days we'll take what we can get. Good job, guys.