Piorkowski's Backhanded Wisdom

I could now ignore the Patriots failure to deal with a ferocious and brilliantly designed Giants attack. I could look past all the human flaws that color even the most splendidly played game. I could see for the first time that games aren't exhibitions of skill and determination, but like ensemble experiments in quantum mechanics. We may not be able to predict the outcome of a single game just as we cannot predict the result of a certain measurement. But over time, over thousands of trials, the results would converge on a certain mean value. This epiphany hit me like a bolt of lightning. Everything I had thought was great in sports — Willie Mays' over the shoulder catch, Laettner's turn around jump shot, Joe Montana's pass to Dwight Clark — was not really great, but a mere blip — random noise in the wavefunction of the Universe.

For the first time in my life I know what it's like to be free.