The Colts must win it all and they must win it all now.

First appeared on December 23rd, 2009
in The Lebanon Reporter

All this talk about 16 and 0 has more heads spinning than the County Fair Tilt-a-Whirl. Go for it or don’t. It means everything or it means nothing. What will they do? Is Jim Caldwell really willing to sacrifice a 14-0 start?
With all this undefeated noise clogging our airways it would once again seem we are unable to see the forest for the trees. Forget staying undefeated in the regular season, it is the looming playoff run that will ultimately define the year as well as likely determine the fate of the Colts franchise. What are they? Are they truly champions? Perhaps they are merely just a team built to dominate the regular season. Are they truly the best or are they simply the ones who wanted it more when the games meant less?
Sure they have won the AFC South (like every year since the NFL created it). But what does that really get you? We also know how the NFL regular season works. Some teams get everybody’s best shot. Defending champions (Pittsburgh), the media darlings (Dallas), public enemy #1 (New England) and then there are those who fly beneath the radar gobbling up wins like a champion Hungry-Hungry-Hippo player. A small market traveling medicine show piloted by arguably the greatest football mind ever to lace them up. Is this an accurate description of the Indianapolis Colts or are they truly the best?
A Super Bowl trophy is the only thing that can prove once and for all that the Colts are the class franchise of the NFL. Without it they are all merely deckhands on the S.S. Manning charting a path towards the land where the Buffalo Bills roam. As great as this season has been and as amazing as Manning has played, history won’t remember 16-0 without a championship (see the Patriots). History is far kinder to champions. That’s why Emmitt Smith is doing Just For Men Hair Gel commercials and Thurman Thomas is, well we don’t really know what Thurman Thomas is doing now do we?
The point is the Colts have come too far not to finish this thing. Would anyone really care about Christopher Columbus had he almost made the Caribbean only to turn back home because he forgot to DVR “Desperate Housewives”? Not securing a Lombardi Trophy this season would be like the Allies successfully invading Normandy only to go on and lose to the Axis powers. We’re talking about history now and history is bigger than any sprained toe or sore knee. History is forever.
The answer is simple. The Colts need to play their last 5 games like they are the last games they will ever play. They need to play like caged lions turned loose in a Turkey pen on Thanksgiving morning. They need to play like they are foot soldiers marching to the sea with General Sherman. They need to play like they are all stunt doubles acting in the last five minutes of any Bruce Willis movie ever made (except Blind Date of course). They need to play with the reckless abandon Olive Oyl would show in a steel cage death match with a female East German Olympic athlete sporting thighs the size of an elephant’s neck. Well, you get the idea.
The time is now. The accomplishments of this season to date mean little. The gaudy statistics are nice, but without the luster of a championship trophy records tend to tarnish with age. Everything that matters lies on the horizon; the question is whether the Colts will make it that far or not.