The game played at Soldier Field on Sunday looked like something out of the circus — the Family Circus, to be specific.
Heads up to readers under the age of 40: the Family Circus is a newspaper comic strip (remember comic strips? Remember newspapers?) famous for being never particularly funny. Creator Bill Keane’s long-running strip depicted the borderline-amusing-but-never-quite-actually-comedic misadventures of one family, mostly from the perspective of their four vaguely potato-shaped children, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and P.J.
Although still chugging along since its creation back in 1960, the Family Circus is now best known as a font of online memory, thanks to their simple format. Each strip is a single panel with a caption at the bottom, making it easy to swap out the original, cheesy half-joke with something like, well, whatever the heck this is:
One of the recurring Family Circus gags involves someone telling one of the kids — oh, let’s say Billy — to go do an easy chore somewhere nearby, then tracing via dotted line Billy’s elaborately circuitous path before eventually arriving at his obvious destination. (Remember, I told you it wasn’t funny.)
The above drawing could be seen as just another borderline-near-chuckle-inducing installment of the Family Circus, but if you squint a little, it’s also an abstract representation of the Minnesota Vikings’ path to victory on Sunday.
You can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Zone Coverage’s own Nelson Thielen predicted this game would be a slop fest, and editor-in-chief Tom Schreier already knew ahead of time that this game would reveal frustratingly little about the Vikings’ actual status among the NFL powerhouses.
Turns out, the game was more than just a circus for the whole family, but it went to the far side of absurdity. Like one of those not-so-adorable kids from Bill Keane’s Sunday funnies, the Vikings had an inevitable destination — a close, ugly win against a shoddy rival — and they eventually got there, but in the longest, strangest, most confounding way ever.
It makes almost too much sense, given that Peanuts creator Charles Schulz hailed from St. Paul, that the Vikings fanbase is often compared to Charlie Brown still hoping Lucy will be a reliable holder on a field goal attempt. (I would argue that Linus endlessly anticipating the arrival of the Great Pumpkin is a better metaphor for Minnesota’s Super Bowl hopes, but whatever.) But even for this cartoonishly tormented fanbase, Sunday’s game was a real kick in the peanuts.
If you saw it, you know. If you didn’t witness it with your own eyes, it’s nearly impossible to explain the absurdity of a team managing to blow an 11-point lead in under two minutes. At least a catastrophic fumble on a kickoff return would be understandable. This elaborate folly required an escalating series of unfortunate events, a kind of cosmic parlay of bad luck in which the only way the Vikings could avoid a kneel-down victory was for the Bears to drive down the field and score a touchdown with only two timeouts remaining, then complete the two-point conversion they failed at earlier in the quarter, then recover an onside kick under the new rules that make it close to statistically impossible, then drive into field goal range with no timeouts, then successfully complete the kick — the latter of which they had notoriously failed to do in another NFC North showdown last week, and then again earlier in this very game.
But the game only reached the true heights of absurdity when, after a cosmic ballet of cascading improbabilities that the ESPN statisticians deemed near-mathematically impossible, the inevitable happened. That long, crazy windup led to the exact outcome everyone had been anticipating for most of the last two quarters. The Vikings held on for an ugly but expected win. We went all that way just to get right over there.
Sunday’s game was a near metaphysical phenomenon that could only occur between the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. One franchise finds an infinity of new ways to flummox its loyalists, while the other can transform any good fortune into calamity. Even by Vikings standards, this one took an incredibly circuitous path to an inevitable destination. And even by Bears standards, the crushing inevitability of this one was especially crushing.
It was cartoonish absurdity perfectly fit for the Sunday funnies — not ha-ha funny, but as perplexing as an arcane Far Side, as inscrutable as Doonsbury, an absolute circus.
