Tom Brady is our only hope. I know this is true in the same way I know millions of people will be screaming obscenities at their televisions this Sunday as Brady leads a late-game drive to defeat the Los Angeles Rams. Tom Brady is inevitable – as is climate change.
Look, humanity is down by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. Seas are rising, temperatures are increasing. If you ask me, climate change is getting cocky; it’s that drunk friend who calls to gloat with ten minutes left in the fourth. Now is the perfect time to give Brady the “ball.”
I don’t invoke He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named lightly. I hate Brady so much that I would only be slightly enthused if he were traded to my team. Number 12 is the least inspirational person in sports. Rooting for him is like rooting for carpet or income inequality. Brady is the movie Rudy if Rudy made the team his first year, became a star, then went on to a long and storied career in the NFL where he collected trophies like they were flu vaccines and wore stupid sweaters during post-game press conferences.
Still, as much as I loathe Brady I know we need him. Consider the facts. Brady is something like 78 years old and yet he keeps winning. This will be the fifty-third Super Bowl and Brady has been in, I think, most of them. We need the impossible and for that we turn to a perennial winner, someone who will turn climate change into the Atlanta Falcons of Super Bowl LI.
I don’t know how Brady will do it, just like I don’t know how he convinced the Seahawks to throw from the one-yard line. Maybe he’ll stuff the smokestacks of every coal-fired power plant with deflated footballs, or maybe he’ll utilize an endless series of slant routes to wear down CO2 and simply convince it to just stop trying.
I once suspected that Brady made a pact with the devil whereby he would win a lot of Super Bowls but not all of them, lest people get suspicious. In this sinister plot, the Patriots would purposely lose a championship here and there to instill a false sense of hope among the league’s other teams. The rest of the NFL would start to believe that it stood a chance of winning, or at least making the big game, only to have their seasons end in defeat – but no.
Tom Brady wasn’t forged in hell and sent to Earth to punish fans whose teams reside in the AFC East. And no, as much as I’d like to believe that that 6-foot-4, 225-pound shit-eating grin retains his youthful vigor by snorting the crushed dreams of the opposing teams’ fans – he doesn’t. Tom Brady is an unstoppable force, a man who defies statistics and the ordinary person’s good luck. I mean, the son of a bitch is gorgeous and he’s married to a model and he’s a millionaire and he’s in a movie with Marky Mark!
You can go on hating Tom Brady. Boo him all you want, Brady can’t hear you. He stuffs an extra pair of Super Bowl rings inside his ears during games – they’re that disposable to him! Anyway, where was I… oh yeah, just know that he’s our only legitimate threat to stopping climate change. I mean, the process is already underway and an uncomfortably large percentage of the population still thinks it’s a hoax. Well guess what, Tom Brady is very real and he’s going to do to climate change what he does to the Jets.
You might think I’m happy. I’m not. I keep asking myself which is worse: a world where food shortages, raging wildfires, drought, catastrophic hurricanes and other Biblical-scale calamities are the norm or a world where none of this happens because of Tom Brady? It’s a close one – 51 to 49 percent in favor of letting Brady work his magic on climate change, although those numbers could easily flip this Sunday if Brady wins – again. At that point, there really wouldn’t be a reason to go on living.
