Cardinals just beat the Packers by wait what huh

After the football game ended, I turned my attention to boxing on the other screen.

Deontay Wilder, the WBC heavyweight champion with few equals, had just knocked Artur Szpilka out cold. That happened almost the same time as Larry Fitzgerald tore a warpath over hell and high water. Now Wilder was spitting crazed fire at Tyson Fury, another heavyweight champion who had just invaded the ring. The scene was torn straight from WWE and made real in the crazed dimension of fighting sports. Eyes bulging, Wilder was screaming his trademark line. "BOMB SQUAD!"

Yet all that spectacle and surreality was pale and vapid next to the unholy menace we had all injected straight into our veins in the name of football.

What had happened was roughly 40 minutes of PCP-fueled gibberish. It was sport. It was football, goddammit, but not football as we know it.

I struggle to recall anything before that trip. That's been the case of the whole of this playoff. 50 minutes of nonsense capped by finishes that question your sanity. This one was new. This one was fresh. This one terrified my mind in ways I didn't think possible.

How did Carson Palmer get that ball through that window? How did Michael Floyd catch it? That shouldn't have happened! All our wisdom and science fail us in that moment and the dark ages laugh. That should have been that. You saw heaven, now get down. End this ride.

That should have done it for the Packers, but Aaron Rodgers decided that reality hadn't been broken just enough. That strange sapient creature heaved the ball to the heavens twice to Jeff Janis and recreated horror and despair in my heart. Did I mention he did it twice? He did that. Somehow he made it work as Cardinals defenders looked dumbfounded and Janis stole the ball in the endzone to tie the game with no time.

How in the good lord's holy name do you fail to flip a coin?

This should have been drawn out just long enough for Green Bay to triumph, long enough for Arizona to fall yet again. Carson Palmer was flailing near the end, unpredictable, dangerously close to reverting back to that once-lost persona with back-breaking interceptions. That MVP talk was degenerating into Pentecostal gibberish right there on national television. Rather, Palmer found Larry Fitzgerald and the green. Larry ran, ran as only he could, smashing past dumbfounded yellow helmets. Then at the goal line, Palmer seized up once more. You could see it in his eyes, the same panic roiling in a man when he realizes what kind of wild shit he just put his brain on. And then just when it looked like this whirlwind nonsense would find overtime extended, there was Fitzgerald again. Somehow. A pitch and the damn endzone.

Larry Fitzgerald. I don't have enough words to talk about him. I just hope this wild train he's riding takes him right out for the coast.

Should the Packers have had a chance to respond in spite of cruel overtime rules? Should they have got the coin even though it didn't flip and went against them on the second try? Hell no! Those weak mewling excuses are supposed to be for lesser organizations, you filthy degenerates! They're supposed to win football games! Be tough! Fight! Win! Win! Vince Lombardi scowls at the lot of you. Oh he scowls.

This is now the second year in a row the Packers have been bounced in sudden death overtime without a chance to respond to their defensive failures.

Failure.

Packer fans are headed home to the dark alien hellscape of Wisconsin yet again. There were a murder of them at University of Phoenix Stadium. Feel no pity for them, for their kind have none to give in return. However, for the sake of a kindness, I suggest they check out the Horny Toad up in Cave Creek. Excellent fried chicken. Nothing in that sad Badger State holds a candle to it. Go ahead, try it out. See what the rest of this great nation calls food.

(Oh you know I'm going to take a shot at those miserable cretins. I can't help it.)