Some days nobody wins.  Doesn't matter who you pull for.  They're doomed.

Is it personal?  Is the universe lining up an intricate series of belts and pulleys and the teeth are all meshing together in just the exact way required for every single team you back to free fall into the pits of loserdom?  Who is pulling the lever?  An old girl friend?  There are suspects.

And it's my birthday.  This is not how it supposed to go.

I'm riding around Greensboro trying to get Wake Forest and Navy on the radio.  There's one A.M. station that carries Wake Forest.  It's like being the one missionary who doesn't get to go to the really cool countries with all the best forms of poverty.  Carrying Wake Forest is being a missionary to an unimpoverished country.  Like Belgium.  On the face of it, a ridiculous idea.  Why is it even necessary?  What can be accomplished?  Who listens to the Demon Deacs on radio?  What IS a Demon Deac?

I'm a Navy fan who has season tickets to Wake Forest.  Why?  Because it's twenty-five minutes from driveway to parking lot and I didn't renew my UNC tickets in time.  One of those things I meant to do.  You get to be 51 and there are any number of those things.

So I get the game on and Navy scores to take the lead.  Life is good.  I go into my favorite restaurant, New York Times in hand, and have a good meal. Well, sort of.  There's this awful woman glaring at two elderly friends of hers she has somehow conned into coming out with her and then cowed into verbal submission.  She's screaching about some injustice committed by some man.  Yep, we're all scum.  But scum with a New York Times to read and lunch to enjoy.  On my birthday.  Then the wedding party comes in.  52 or so intimate friends fresh from a rehearsal of the living hell the young couple's life is about to become.  30 or so guys, 29 with the same dorky hair cut.  Oh well, the coffee was good.

I leave Navy to their own devices for 55 minutes and what happens?  They're down 10 points that will turn to 20 or more.  I change stations.  John Paul Jones famously said in worse circumstances, "I have not yet begun to fight".  Not me.  I dived overboard and turned to the BBC on the local NPR station.

Figured I would check up on Britain against South Africa in the rugby title game. 
You never get good sports reporting on the BBC.  The anchors are obviously not interested in sports but make an effort to chit chat with the correspondants at the events.  "I image it is quiet a scene there.  Meanwhile here in London I am clipping every single sentence and speaking at a frequency only dogs can hear, because I appear to have a stick up a certain part of my anatomy."  Anyway it's 15-6 with 5 minutes left and South Africa is winning.  I'm pulling for England.  (I've always felt we were a bit hasty with the whole independence thing so I try to atone by supporting their sports teams).

This being the BBC, where political correctness would be a religion if they didn't hate religion, the score is followed by 10 minutes discussion of why South Africa has only two non-white players on their team.  Ironically, while condemning the team for a lack of diversity, the presenter explains that South Africans of color are generally small people, unlike the North Africans who can be quite large.  I give up trying to understand this whilst negotiating the release of my dry cleaning, which is being held hostage by staff members who insist that I only imagined that I owned clothing.

Home it is.  I've got the evening free.  No birthday festivities on tap until tomorrow.  Notre Dame is on TV versus USC.  I'm rooting for, you guessed it, Notre Dame.  They're dressed like leprichans for some reason and McKnight is going in for six through a hole large enough for Charlie Weis to slip through.  It's all very bizarre and hard to understand.  For instance, how is it that every single player on USC seems to be a Sociology major?  Anyway, 0-3.

A change of sport might be in order.  Let's try hockey.  Carolina seems a safe bet against the Flyers.  There's the added incentive of pulling against the Flyers, which is the social responsibility of all right thinking people.  0-4, overtime loss, don't want to talk about it.

Has it come to this?  I'm resting my hopes in the final game of the day on a pitcher named Fausto, and a team whose hats are adorned with a grinning representation of a Native American on massive quantities of amphetamines.   

It's so bad J.D. Drew remembers that he was once a baseball player and tags a grand slam home run.  It goes down hill from there.  Tomorrow the RedSox will win Game 7 and we'll be condemned to watching Manny Ramirez watching the balls Manny Ramirez has just hit, followed by a week of people talking about Manny Ramirez watching the balls Manny Ramirez has just hit. 

And so it ends.  No wins, five losses.  Hopefully, there won't be a fire tomorrow when they light the candles on my cake.

I'll pack an extinguisher just in case.