With all the excitement that’s been going on over the last 9 weeks with Michigan Football, I’ve completely ignored another team that’s been having a ridiculously unexpected undefeated season this fall: my co-ed charity-league two-hand-touch football team.

I play on a team in ZogSports, a grown-up version of the intramural sports you might’ve played in college, which gets a lot of press for being a great alternative singles scene in New York (though the writer of this blog has yet to reap any benefits, even after two seasons of football, one season of soccer, and one season of kickball).

(Yes, part of my grown-up life in the past year has included playing league kickball.)

The football league is exactly what you’d expect. A bunch of young professionals getting together for games on the weekend, followed by drinking (often heavy drinking) and socializing at local bars. My team is the stereotype - a solid mix of girls and guys, a few token minorities, some finance types, accountants, theater managers, actors, and people who push the mute button on the 7-second delay so that you don’t hear curse words during live network television events (yes, I actually do have friends that do this). And of course we have a team name filled with sexual innuendo: Touch Down There.

I joined the team last Spring, when my roommate moved out and offered me his spot on a team he had joined with one of his coworkers. I didn’t know any of the other players at first, since none of them had any other ties to anyone I knew, but we quickly became good friends (see mom, I am meeting new people out here!). I was immediately impressed with the team; we won our pre-season scrimmage and our first regular season game, so it seemed like winning was the norm. But shortly after that, our performance tanked and the rest of the season was spent chalking up the loss column, a trend which I was later told had been prevalent in seasons past. “Whatever,” I thought, “Its not about winning or losing, its about having fun and meeting new people.”

But in the off-season, some of the TDT (short for Touch Down There) regulars decided that some of the non-performers (and non-understand-how-to-play-the-game-ers) would not be joining the team again, in an effort to build a group that actually knew how to play the game and could potentially win games. Fortunately, I made the cut, we added a few trustworthy friends, and I was nominated volunteered to be Captain for the season.

(Holy crap, I just realized that for the first time in my life, I’m “Captain of the Football Team”. This is amazing. Where do I get my head cheerleader in whipped cream bikini?)

(Seriously, where?)

Anyway, the slight restructuring of the team proved to be valuable. Our performance has completely turned around from the previous season, our loss column completely untouched. Some of our games have been offensive massacres, while others have been held together by a defense that seems to find itself in all the right places at all the right times. The parallels to Michigan are a little eery.

At 6-0 with one game to play, we’ve already secured the #1 seed in the 4-team Divisional playoffs. With 6 weeks of momentum behind our backs, we are pretty confident we’ll get to the end of the season next weekend without a loss, we’ll easily work our way past the two Divisional Playoff games the following weekend, and we’ll find ourselves in the Intra-Division playoffs and Conference Championship the weekend after that.

You would think that this would be a good thing, right? Wrong.

For those not keeping count, the Conference Championship is three weekends from now. On Novemeber 18th. Michigan - Ohio State Day.

I made it perfectly clear that should our team make it to the playoff games on the 18th, I would not be attending (I’ve already missed 3 games this season due to Michigan Football - I’m a great Captain). However, this has not rested well with the team, as most of them did not come from big Division I-A schools and thus can’t fathom why life could possibly revolve around one college football game.

After sending out a recap this morning in which I called out a teammate for getting schooled by the other team, I got this response:

So I thought about it, and the only thing more embarassing than that move would be if we couldn’t field a complete team in the championship game because half our team wants to watch TV… Oh my, that would be embarassing…

My reply:

It’s not just ‘tv’ - its hands-down the greatest rivalry in ANY sport, and it is quite possibly the most significant game in the 102-game history of these schools playing each other. This year’s game is THE most important game to be played by any team in the country this year (ESPN is counting down to it, and its still three weeks away).

Referring to it as just “watching tv” is like referring to sex as just “going dancing”.

The wierd paradox of it all is that one of the players on our team was born and raised in Columbus, and is therefore a diehard Buckeye fan. Our rivalry has been a fun addition to the team, though as November 18 has drawn closer (and both teams have kept winning), the tension between us has definitely grown. At a time when one would expect us to be divided, our team’s resentment towards our missing the game has actually united us. His response to my email:

Amen to that Amish… That is however the only thing we will agree on till 11/19!

Its a weird “Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting” thing.

So what’s the point of all of this? I can’t exactly remember…something about me having two undefeated teams, both of whose seasons are potentially culminating in games being played at nearly the exact same time on November 18th. In other words, total mindfuck.