oh the bitter sting (rewritten)

Here is my attempt to rewrite my post, that mysteriously disappeared yesterday. So as you probably can imagine from the title, the Prague Lions, suffered a heartbreaking loss to our cross-town rivals, the Prague Panthers, in the championship game on Friday night. The final score was 24-14, which doesn’t sound too bad, but it felt more crushing than it sounds. I think most of my teammates, including myself, would agree that the word “mediocre” would some up our team performance, and many of our individual performances too, on Friday night. Which is sad, because this was the biggest Czech League Championship contested yet. I say this because the Panthers have reestablished themselves at the top of the league, but in our last meeting we nearly pulled out an upset. If we could have had another couple of minutes of regulation before going into overtime I think we could have one, but we lost in overtime. Secondly, we played in the beautiful new Slavia Football (soccer) Stadium, here is a quick video I found:

New Slavia Prague Football Stadium EDEN 8 – Awesome video clips here
It was great! We enjoyed a great field, big locker rooms, jumbo-trons and more. Sadly, we couldn’t put things together for the upset win, as I (we) was (were) anticipating.

I was among the first ones in the locker room and I was the last one out (which is the preferred non-superstitious custom I’ve had since high school). I guess, I dragged my feet getting out of there hoping that there might be a different result when I exited. Unfortunately, there wasn’t. Instead of joining my teammates, for what we had hoped would have been our celebration after the game, I went home to get some alone time (I spent yesterday laying low as well, I’m thankful that my director, Billy, and his wife, Adrianne, invited me up for burgers. It was great having human contact and playing with the kids.) at home. I, of course, had to call my father, who has also doubled as my coach and biggest fan for quite some time, and fill him in on the disappointing loss. He listened. And listened some more. And listened some more. Then responded with his famous line I’ve heard delivered after each of his teams’ hard losses – “Well the sun will come up tomorrow men!” Or in this case, “Son.” I then had an email waiting in my mailbox yesterday entitled, “The sun came up/time to move on for tomorrow.” Well said father… So we are starting to move on. My body didn’t adjust to playing again very well this season; so I will let it heal up as I evaluate things for next season. Thanks for the encouragements and prayers I received last week before the game. You are a blessing!