mid-winter sports update

"What?" you are saying, "it's only mid-winter?" Hang in there, readers.  Maybe some sports news will warm you up.

And I need to write this quickly, in this potentially brief moment when my favorite winter sports team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, has a winning record (23-22).  Half the season is over, and the Wolves, as usual, have been a disappointment from pre-season expectations, but they still have a shot at a playoff spot if they can get their act together.  Hope is alive.  Basketball is a long season.

Football, the shortest sports season, ends Sunday with the Superbowl, the most overstated of all sporting events.  It's the Denver Broncos vs. the Seattle Seahawks, neither of which teams is easy to care about, but I'm leaning toward rooting for Seattle, first of all because I like the city of Seattle but also because I loved Seattle player Richard Sherman's trash-talk a couple weeks ago after the Seahawks beat the 49ers --while most people hated it.  Hey people, it's football, not a sensitivity workshop!

The biggest talk the Superbowl this year has generated is what the weather will be like in an outdoor northern stadium, in this case Met Life stadium in North Jersey, which has had some extremely wintry weather lately.  It was fun picturing those corporate executives (the only people who attend a Super Bowl) shivering in a blizzard, but the forecast is now for moderate, tolerable temps.  Now all those execs need to worry about is whether Chris Christie will close a bridge or two and they won't be able to get to the game because they're stuck in traffic jams in New York.