So, you think you are a clear headed, flinty-eyed rationalist, do you? You think that all we need for the universe to give up the rest of its secrets is a more powerful telescope, a bigger particle collider, some fancier math theorems, and we will have it knocked. No more mysteries for the human race. Everything will be diced, sliced, analyzed and processed.
In the way of rebuttal, let me point to the recent return of the prodigal son game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New England Patriots, one of the most heralded, discussed and anticipated games in many a year.
The return of Tom Brady. Will the fatted dove of peace be offered? Will the fans still love him? Can the Pats beat him? Oh yes, more story lines than a room full of beat writers pounding away at their typewriters, using only words to describe the action. A truly modern day sports phenomenon this was.
Well, for all those long gone beat writers and all the modern day prognosticators as well as all you hard-headed rationalists, the fates showed that they were not done with our golden haired boy quite yet. On the field where he had rescued the bacon of the New England team with endless last-second heroics, he performed the same feat for his new team, telling the fresh-faced quarterback now playing in Foxborough that it wasn’t his time just yet, that there was still life and magic in the old bones and that the crown wasn’t going to be handed over quite so soon.
And how was it done? The New England kicker, at the very end of the game, after making 35 straight prior kicks — count ‘em — 35, clanged, and I mean CLANGED his potentially game winning kick off the left upright with a sound Thor with his best hammer blow couldn’t have beaten.
Huddled in the end zone, visible only if you looked at them sideways, were the three Fates made up in the guise of Revolutionary War soldiers. They were tittering into their hands, knowing that there are some mysteries the universe is by no means ready to give up and may never give up and that we will always have to leave the ultimate disposition of what results, football and otherwise, to them, whether we like it or not.
There remain more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than our puny sense of the rational can ever hope to get on top of — even in Foxborough.
Millerton resident Theodore Kneeland was a former teacher and coach — and athlete.
