Monday night after the Jerry Lewis telethon, we got to see Dolphins-Vikings on Channel 3. And, as you can see, even though it was just a preseason game, the rematch of Super Bowl VIII(!) was given significant play in The Miami News the following morning. It made 1A of the Minneapolis Tribune, too--though not with the above-the-fold, bigger-than-the-masthead alarm visible in passing by newsstands or vending boxes.
As previously reported, 6-year-old I raged and sobbed when the Dolphins' 1974 season ended in that horrible "Sea of Hands" game against the Raiders. By the time this preseason game turned up on NFL Monday Night Football nine months later, though, I was 7. I'd gone through Csonka, Kiick and Warfield (finally) actually leaving for the WFL, and a (probably necessary) stoicism had set in around my relationship to the Dolphins.
Also if I wasn't already girlcrazy by Monday, Sept. 2, 1975, I was right on the precipice of it. Because at the first chili supper of the 1975-76 school year at Concord Elementary, when some sixth-graders did a lip-sync performance of "Saturday Night" by the Bay City Rollers, I was totally dazzled by at least two of the girls in my second-grade class. And I think that must've happened not long after the Bay City Rollers made their U.S. debut on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which was Oct. 4.
So somewhere between Dec. 21, 1974, when the Dolphins lost to the Raiders, and a Monday night not long after Oct. 4, 1975, is when I tipped into being more interested in the girls than the Dolphins. Now, as to trying to more precisely pinpoint this change, I noted a little braincell of decades-old innocent sadness when I scrolled upon the following story today inside the Sept. 2, 1975, Miami News.
02 Sep 1975, Tue The Miami News (Miami, Florida) Newspapers.com
It was a sense of genuine discovery this morning, as though I felt at the time this was really bad news (and I would've been right; neither Anderson nor Buoniconti played in NFL75) and hadn't revisited the original feeling since. The intensity of that memory might indicate that my girlcraziness hadn't quite claimed dominance in my heart by the time of Monday Night Football game. But there's no way it hadn't taken hold by the Bay City Rollers thing a month later. And while I never quit loving the Dolphins after that, I never again cared about them as much as I cared about the girls.
For pretty much my whole life I've thought it was kind of cruel that the amazing Dolphins turned me on at such a young age, only to never achieve that same success since. But as I type this morning, I see grace and blessing in the timing--the Dolphins were at their best when I was least encumbered in enjoying their success, and whatever disappointments I experienced with them in the years since never consumed me.
In fact, the last moment that the Dolphins actually seemed like they might win another Super Bowl--in the third quarter of the Dec. 21 Dolphins-Vikings game in Week 16 of NFL02--is literally when my eventual wife and I started dating. The 2002 Dolphins were fantastic until the fourth quarter of that game. Then I left Matthew's before the game was over to go see her, and then we decided that day that we would be a thing, and then the Dolphins lost to the Vikings and didn't even make the playoffs, and now we are still a thing.
I've got more girl stuff going in my life than ever now--the wife and since a daughter, a female cat and a female dog. Happily, totally girlcrazy, still. I'm excited about the 2022 Dolphins; I think they might end up being pretty good. Heck, I'm excited about the 1975 Dolphins, and I know they end up being not super. Mostly, though, I'm just trying to be breathy Patti York at the 1975 Jerry Lewis telethon--"so strong and bold as life unfolds its mystery to me."
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