Chiefs at Colts - Wild-Card Playoff Game

I imagine introductions are in order.

Andy Reid, please meet The Curse. Curse, Andy Reid.

Annnd Alex Smith, Curse. Curse, Alex Smith.

John Dorsey, step up here -- John Dorsey, The Curse. Curse, John Dorsey.

Clark Hunt -- oh, wait, I believe you two have already met. Fine.

Oh, and the rest of the world happening to peek in on this, this Chiefs fan-thing, please, may I.

Now that we're all acquainted, let's get down to business.

This is the eighth straight playoff loss in a row for the Chiefs, an extension of the NFL record for consecutive post-season losses ever already held by, yes, the Chiefs. This is the seventh straight one-and-out we've had, the 11th in 13 postseason appearances since the merger. The Colts have now beaten us in 13 of the last 15 games we've played them, and sure enough, The Charm that covers them was on today, full-blast.

In my previous blog post, when I previewed this game, I predicted that without The Curse we'd win 34-10.  But with The Curse we'd lose 15-14. Go ahead and look it up. I'll wait. I didn't change a thing in that blog post. Seems like Odin was asleep for the entire 1st half and some of the 2nd. When he woke up his wrath about his brief carelessness was so fierce that he did this to the Chiefs. And for those who didn't quite catch it, we were ahead 38-10 in the middle of the 3rd quarter, and lost 45-44.

I could regale you with every stupid thing that happened to the Chiefs in that quarter-and-a-half. That fumble by Donald Brown? Only to be recovered by Andrew Luck around a sea of Chiefs and leapt in for a touchdown? That says it all. I mean, that one play has got to shoot right into the, say, top five of the interminably long list of contemptibly stupid things that happen in every Chiefs playoff game there is.

All I can say is this is hell, really. I really feel like I'm in the worst kind of hell there is, right now. Jesus said there'd be weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell. For Chiefs fans there is certainly a lot of that, all the time in January. Right now it is particularly excruciating. This must have a title, yes. The Hell of Chiefs Playoff Anything. That's it. With all that the Chiefs had going for them, before the game as far as matchups go, as far as quality of talent goes, and for what they did in the 1st half and then some, there is no way what happened today could happen in a normal, reasonable world -- this is truly some kind of special hell for the Chiefs and their fans. Truly.

And what about the hell that was all the injuries our team suffered today. Our players were hammered, physically, by that bastard today. Damn, what is it with this? This just goes beyond even the whole whether-we-win-or-lose element.

Yeah, I'm too passionate about this team, and too crushed by a curse that is too real and about which Chiefs fans feel too impotent to do anything about. There is that thing inside me that does think we should be proud of a team that did so well after doing so terrible last year. That we'll learn from this, get better, and come out firing next year. These are very good things to think.

But I also know that unless something happens to end The Curse so we may finally get out of The Hell of Chiefs Playoff Anything, and yes, something supernatural, we'll just be wallowing here forever. After today there's nothing that really gets me thinking it'll ever be anything different.

For now, just some links and a couple last thoughts. If you want to get intimate with the brutality of The Curse, just look at my last post. Here's the link to it again. Oh, and by the way, I found out something else to add that, well, I just didn't know about before. With all that stuff about the weather being so cold this weekend, how it could affect playoff games, I happened to see a list of the coldest games in NFL history. No. 1 was the Dallas-Green Bay "Ice Bowl." Everyone knows that. No. 2 was the San Diego-Cincinnati game in 1982. Some know about that. Do you know what No. 3 was? That game in 1996 at Arrowhead between the Colts and Chiefs. Yeah, uh-huh, another head impaled on another stake of The Curse.

For some of the very standard exasperation experienced being in The Hell of Chiefs Playoff Anything, here's the blog post I put up after our loss to the Ravens in 2010. You'll get the idea of how this all feels. Why repeat it all again here.

I also have to direct you to this piece, if you haven't seen it yet, appearing just yesterday, written by a guy I'm not familiar with but who I believe writes about Kansas City sports kinds of things. I have not actually even read it yet, but will. Soon I will, as part of the commiseration, part of the processing, part of the therapy. I haven't even read it but I already know so well what it is about.

One of the first songs that came on the radio after having to endure the agony of listening to the closing minutes of the game (remember, I was driving home from paintballing for my nephew's birthday) was "Heartbreaker" by the Rolling Stones. No, you can't make this up. A bit later was Bruce Hornsby's "That's Just the Way It Is," and if you know the song the follow up line to that is, "Some things will never change."

I write the word ::Sigh:: countless times in this blog. That sentiment is plastering the insides of my soul right now, as it is for every Chiefs fan out there. But yeah, there are some Chiefs fans who'll continue to stand by their team. I'll stand with them, still. The Chiefs could lose the next 57 playoff games, and I'll still be their fan.

Maybe the whole point to all this is when The Curse does end, it'll just be that much sweeter.

I'd like to add one last thing, just one more. I've made a commitment to dwell on a few other pretty damn great sportsy kinds of things that've happened relatively recently, just to get a nice, small, refreshing breath of air sticking my head out from The Hell every once in a while. Hey, one Kansas City football team are World Champions, Sporting KC, the fine professional soccer team, there's that. My major league baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, recently captured two championships in somewhat short succession, and hey, that was after years and years of Baseball Hell for Giants Anything.

And my son's high school football team went undefeated in their season this year, triumphing proudly in their league after they'd spent years playing very below average football.

There'll be some day when the Chiefs will triumph. There will.
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