The next few months were a blur of denial, hair-brained attempts to put things right, and a few too many inebriated nights. I always think of that time as my lost summer. Since then I’ve refound those months, a few times actually, but that second time through was definitely lost.

Winter set in with a clarifying chill. Something about the cold and wind signaled the finality of what I had done. Time marched on, heedless of my nightly pleadings to forgive my temporal transgression. As the vaguely familiar events began to roll across my awareness, the ill-timed snow storm at Halloween, Mrs. Ferguson’s cat suffering that horrible fate in the basement dryer, and finally Harold’s little announcement and subsequent name change , self-recrimination finally gave way to a sort of resigned opportunism.

I knew what would happen as in my case it had happened even though some stuff now wouldn’t happen.

To put it more clearly, me screwing up my love life wasn’t going to change the outcome of the Super Bowl.