on heartbreak, determination & the end of Week 4

32-29, Panthers over Packers. that just breaks my heart. i would take a 7-7 week in the football pool (hell i would have gone 0-14 after the way Favre played his heart out), surrender my undefeated status to drop to 3rd place in my fantasy league (which i did anyway)--just to have seen a check mark in the Packers' win column. not to be. they start the 2005 season 0-4. but what's amazing is that when i went to sleep late in the 3rd quarter (and WAY past my bedtime), the Packers had been trailing 26-13. when Favre scored his first TD of the night early in the game to answer Carolina & tie the game at 7-all, he did his trademark "arms raised in TD form" that i have missed seeing. i thought to myself: "i wish we could see more of that..." turns out he threw for FOUR touchdowns last night...you just won't hear the accolades that the Manning brothers received for doing the same thing because the fact is that Green Bay is falling apart around Favre & they aren't getting the victories to match the tireless effort. more injuries assaulted that team last night, leaving both my favorite teams little more than a pile of broken bodies at this point, limping along, patched together. but once again Brett Favre proved that if one man had the heart & talent & passion to work a miracle comeback & carry the whole team on his broad shoulders, he would certainly be the one--and he definitely tries to every game. he almost did it one more time. almost...and for that my heart breaks--sports-speaking anyway. after a performance like that, he just deserved to win. no one plays with that much heart anymore & to see him have nothing to ultimately show for it feels....cruel somehow.

No one, however, should count on that happening. Green Bay, it seems, is not likely to rebound. Brett Favre? Well, maybe, as Monday demonstrated, he hasn't yet run out of comebacks. Certainly he hasn't run out of passion for the game. Even with everything he has endured in his personal life, and his team collapsing around him, Favre didn't look yet like a guy prepared to walk away from it all.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to act," he said. "I've never been 0-4. For that matter, I'd never been 0-3. But I know that I'm not going to quit trying. You keep trying to tell yourself in games like this that it's not been for nothing. But it feels like that. It feels like it was all for nothing when you lose. You ask yourself: 'What more could I have done?' That eats at you."

"As long as I'm still playing," Favre said, "I'm going to play as hard as I can. That's all I know. It's what they pay me to do. And I'm going to give people their money's worth. I think people respect that but, really, that's how everyone is supposed to play. Right now, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm not going to make any predictions."(quotes excerpted from Len Pasquarelli on ESPN.com)

so much for Week 4...i guess we all have to put it behind us & play a new game next week.