Cheers, cheeseheads!

Man, my whole body was thumping.

Roethlisberger's lining up behind center, the Steelers with a first down and two minutes left in the game, needing a long drive and touchdown to win the game.

I've been here before.  Two years ago I sat and watched SB XLIII in a beautiful timeshare near Cairns, Australia.  Arizona had just taken the lead on a long Warner-to-Fitzgerald pass, and Roethlisberger came out onto the field with not much time left and proceeded to quickly move the Steelers downfield for the winning score.  Broke my heart.

He's been here before, I've been here before, I'm nervous as hell, my heart is pounding so hard my whole body is thumping!

I was excited enough about the game that I didn't sleep all that well last night.  I had a nice big dinner with Yungnane and his wife and two boys, and VP Feng and his wife, at a seafood restaurant near Yungnane's house.  Usually when you have a group that size, everyone sits around a big round table, but this restaurant also had some square tables, albeit still topped with the round lazy susan that let's you spin everything around to whoever wants something.  Rather than bringing everything all at once, as is customary in American restaurants, it's more typical here at a dinner like this for the dishes to come out one at a time.  We started with some good fresh sashimi, then a couple of soups, some oysters and clams, a whole fish cooked in some nice flavors, then some pretty succulent pork, as well as some short ribs, and as we were winding down, a plate of snails.  They had a freezer with some cartons of self-serve ice cream, so I filled a little bowl with some chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, chocolate, and mango ice cream to finish off an excellent dinner.  Then as I was finishing that up, they brought out a plate of what I was told was octopus mouth or octopus nose, not sure which, but they were little fried balls that tasted a lot like fried calamari.  They were quite good, and I would like to have eaten more, but the salty after the sweet dessert wasn't so enticing.  Then as is pretty typical, the dinner was completed with a plate of fresh fruit, in this case orange slices.

Before dinner Yungnane had taken me back to the big RT Mart store, where I bought a nice memory foam pad to put on my bed that will make sleeping much more comfortable.  (I also bought a plug-in kettle to heat water in my room, to go along with the little French press I bought last week, to make it easier to make my own coffee.)  So I was looking forward to getting a good night's sleep, but after coming back from dinner and reading news, doing a little work, playing some spider solitaire online, I still wasn't all that tired, but went to bed at 12:30 since the game started at 7:30 and I was hoping for nearly seven hours of sleep.  The past few days I've been setting my alarm for seven hours after going to bed, but each day I've been pretty tired still when the alarm went off, so I've shut it off and got another 45 minutes or so of sleep.  I set the alarm for 7:15, didn't fall asleep very quickly, didn't sleep all that soundly, and was reasonably awake already by the time the alarm went off, so I got up, made sure the coverage was streaming online, and made myself a cup of coffee to settle in.

I've got two old, wooden chairs in my room, both of them kind of creaky, they've both come apart a bit already, so I'm hoping they last for my three months here.  With the game on the small computer screen, my only real option is to sit on one of the chairs right in front of the computer, so that's where I plant myself for most of the next three-plus hours.  The game got off to a great start for the Packers, better than anyone could have hoped for, but the late touchdown at the end of the first half left one feeling that the game was still pretty tight even though the Pack had just had an 18-point lead.  When I learned at the beginning of the second half, though, that Woodson was out for the game, I started having a feeling of dread.

In liking the Packers chances during the two weeks since the championship games, my rather unformed intuition was that they had the winning edge because of their secondary, and their ability to come up with key interceptions.  When they got two in the first half, including Collins' pick-six to give the Pack a quick 14-0 start, I was definitely feeling confirmed in my suspicions.  So when Woodson went down, the leader of the defense, with Shields hurt also, all of a sudden that advantage seemed to disappear, and there was plenty of reason to be concerned as to whether Green Bay would be able to stop the Steeler offense.  It would be up to Rodgers to score enough points to keep the Packers in front.

So the drama was set, and I was tense the entire second half.  Pittsburgh moved within one score and had the ball back in their hands, driving for what could be the go-ahead touchdown.  But then the highest-profile Trojan in the NFL, Clay Matthews, after being told on the sideline by his coach that "now is the time," lowered his shoulder as he tackled running back Rashard Mendenhall and popped the ball loose, and the Packers capitalized on their third turnover to drive in for a score that gave them a not-quite-safe 11-point lead.  After a quick Steeler score and two-point conversion on a great option play, the lead was cut to three with about eight minutes left, and now anything could happen.

I sat quietly in my creaky chair, taking deep breaths and feeling my heart beat, boom...boom..., and watched Rodgers take his team downfield, unable to punch it in for the TD but getting a field goal that now forced Pittsburgh to also score a touchdown.  They made it harder on themselves with the unnecessary roughness penalty that pushed them back inside the 15, which I didn't feel bad about at all since the refs blew a call near the end of the first half when they called a facemask penalty that wasn't, giving Pittsburgh a short field that helped them get their late score.  So getting moved back for this final drive seemed like poetic justice.

Without enough time left to run the ball, the Steelers were not able to play to their strength, and Big Ben was forced into a passing game.  So it game down to this -- Roethlisberger's proven ability to come through in the clutch, versus a weakened Packer secondary trying to bring the Lombardi trophy back to Titletown.   After giving up some yards, they tightened up a bit, and when a third-and-five pass fell incomplete, the game came down to the next play.  The defense makes the play, Wallace doesn't make the catch, the ball falls on the ground, the refs call incomplete, and the Packers start to celebrate.  Quarterbacks will tell you that their favorite play is taking a knee, so Rodgers got to do it twice before the clock hit 0:00 and the Green Bay Packers had won their fourth Super Bowl!