The Cowboys Stadium’s 80,000 folded seats resembled bats with wings neatly tucked, awaiting their night flight from a grand cave. It was barren as an abandoned Roman coliseum.
Food vendors tried hawking their wares to — no one. Team paraphernalia bedecked with logos and favorite player numbers remained boxed and unsold. Even the women’s restrooms, with their customary interminably long lines, were empty and silent, save the incessant dripping of leaking faucets. Pigeons, expecting crumbs from the crowds, lurched awkwardly, pecking at nothing. Scoreboards displayed scores of zero, awaiting digital signals that would never come.
This year, no one attended the Super Bowl. The looming question is: “Why?”
Everyone who should have been there stayed home. Instead of pouring into their cars and clogging the roadways, they reneged. Rare as a Super Lotto winner, the odds of everybody deciding – the same day – that they, like me, would stay home, were long odds indeed.
Some say this year’s Bowl was cursed. Freezing weather across the center of the country, including a rare ice and snowstorm in Dallas, made traveling foreboding, even hazardous.
Perhaps the stay-at-home populous staged a silent protest of the Super Bowl venue, NFL’s newest football shrine, the $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys Stadium that lined the pockets of the wealthy while homeless squatters huddled in the shadows of the nearby metropolis.
Some said it was because would-be fans had grown weary of watching hired guns, football behemoths who had no natural linkage, except for their paychecks, to the respective teams and cities that employed them.
Suppose they “gave a Super Bowl” and nobody came?
Someday, we may actually find out.