As all things must come to an end, Brett Favre’s record of consecutive games has ended at 297.
Will there be a weepy press conference?
Will the Vikings ever recover from the twin swaths of destruction that have befallen them this week?
As a slightly cranky Packers fan, I hope the answer to both questions is “no.”
****
That said, I remember when Favre started with the Pack. It was a few years after my mother and i had moved back to Wisconsin after an unwelcome annum in New Mexico, something that I was happy about in part because Wisconsin had a professional sports teams. Sure, the Harlem Globetrotters came to Albuquerque once while we were there, and UNM’s basketball team can be a force to be reckoned with. But there were no Brewers. Or Packers. A few tumbleweeds here and there, but no Packers.
Our return happened when Don Majkowski was on QB, and like many things about our state, the Packers were something that we loved almost in spite of themselves. So when this handsome new Favre came to the team, we could amuse ourselves with folks stumbling over his name, just as we had before with Majkowski. But soon, we saw that Favre represented the start of a new era for the Packers. And with him, some day, we just might even make it to the Super Bowl!
The rest, of course, is history. As were many things about Favre’s days with the Pack. It was a special time, when we had heroes like Reggie White and Mark Chmura, still untainted in the public eye. And when Favre throwing an unbelievably risky pass to Antonio Freeman would start with a gasp and end with wild cheers.
I had the pleasure of taking in a few games up at Lambeau Field. My favorite was the deep freeze the Pack put on the Miami Dolphins in a frigid December game. Also notable was when the whole stadium breathed a sigh of relief during the opening ceremony of an October 2001 game, in which, perhaps unwisely at the time, an Air Force jet did a low flyover of the stadium, giving the crowd a collective oh-shit-are-we-gonna-die? moment.
But, like all things, that ended. It’s a little sad Favre didn’t make it to 300 games. But if he had retired, and stayed that way, he wouldn’t have gotten this close. Which seems to make it more pathetic than saddening. Go figure.
Either way, rest assured, we’ll never forget you, Brent.
The development of high-speed intercity passenger rail in the Midwest is part of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail Corridor, a 3,000-mile Midwest passenger rail network radiating from Chicago and serving nine states.
Speaking of…