Around the metro area, Sunday, families reconnected for the first time in months. Naps were taken, priests and pastors delivered fully developed homilies and sermons and people actually had extended conversations without one eye cocked to the television.
The reason? The Ravens didn’t play yesterday.
It really is that simple. In a nation where schisms divide the populace along musical, cultural and political lines, the one thing on which people find commonality is a love of football.
True story: After my church service ended Sunday, I walked into a room with 10 women ranging in age from the teens to the decidedly seasoned.
There was one television set in the room and nearly everyone in the room was watching the football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and New Orleans Saints.
Yes, football, and particularly the NFL has long been our national religion, our universal obsession. And there are few, if any signs that that football’s gravitational pull on the populace will lessen any time soon.
You might have thought that with the events of the offseason, where, for instance, former Ravens running back Ray Rice was caught on camera punching his then fiancée in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino, our great fixation might lessen.
The Rice video launched a long needed national conversation about how women are treated in our society and about what we do to counter the scourge of domestic violence.
In the process, we learned that the NFL, under the leadership of commissioner Roger Goodell, has been severely negligent in how it deals with the issue.
Goodell badly mangled Rice’s initial punishment, handing a mere two game suspension, then grossly overcompensated once the video of the incident was made public by a tabloid website.
The league’s reputation has been seriously compromised, but fans appear to have separated the misdoings of management from the game itself.
Far from abandoning the NFL, fans continue to embrace the game. The two most popular network television programs each week through the first two months of the new fall prime time schedule were Sunday night NFL games, followed by Thursday night NFL games.
And if there are signs that the NFL is any less popular here in Baltimore, the seeming epicenter of the conflict, they certainly aren’t apparent.
The stands at the Ravens’ stadium are still teeming, even amid stories that the team’s management may not have been forthcoming about what it knew about Rice.
Folks here, like they do in other NFL cities where players have run afoul of convention and maybe the law, seem to be able to compartmentalize whatever disgust they have for what Rice did and root the Ravens on without reservation.
So, as the team returns to work from a week off, they’ll approach the final six regular season games with a 6-4 record. It’s not stellar, to be sure, but they have a decent chance to make the playoffs with a solid push.
Perhaps more significantly, the Ravens will resume their role as arguably the most unifying force in our community, the source of conversation from Westminster to Dundalk and plenty of places in between.
And life will go back to normal on Sundays.