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Sports.

By Jamey Newberg | Monday, January 5, 2015

Back in the late ’90s, there was a four-month stretch at the end of each year when I’d roll into work Monday morning, sometimes Tuesday, and dump a few hundred or more words about the Cowboys game played the day before into an email that would scatter out to a few dozen fellow lawyers at Vial Hamilton Koch & Knox, and maybe a dozen or two others outside the office. The reply-all’s to the Roundtable volleys would pretty much wipe out a bunch of folks’ mornings, starting with boos on that day’s email title (“Big Apple Turnover” . . . “Redbird Maul” . . . “Jason and the Gruden Fleece”) and branching out from there into the finest displays of Monday Morning quarterbacking.

That was shortly before I started writing the Newberg Report, which for so many reasons was a fortunate decision for me, not the least of which is my family life. I’m fairly sure Ginger wouldn’t have had any shred of interest in me if she’d been around me during a bunch more Cowboys games than she was when we were dating, and once she married Dr. Jekyll (untroubled by the prospects of living with Mr. Hyde), if I’d gone on to act during Rangers games the way I do when the Cowboys are on TV — or if football was on every night — the trophy for her sticking around . . . well, I don’t even want to think about that.

Or maybe I’m not all that bad when the Cowboys are on.

(Or maybe she’s just unbelievably forgiving.)

(Probably that.)

Just before yesterday’s kickoff, I tweeted: “Whatever happens, I love this and miss this. This is why.”

Baseball will give that to us again, soon.

Four hours later, during most of which I was in Hyde mode, once my blood pressure had settled back down I could think of only one word, and it’s the one I slap down as the title of this morning’s report.

(As I continue to resist the 17-year-old urge to trick the titles up, and believe me, back in 1998 a huge win like that one over a team called the “Lions” would have been fertile ground.)

My Sunday started, as I’m sure it did for lots of you, with the Stuart Scott news, and I ended up watching ESPN for more hours yesterday morning than I had the last however-many months combined.

Sports brings out the best of us, and the worst, and other things, too. Not all of it is good, and there’s pain and anger mixed in with the edge and the drama and the thrill, but I’ll take all of it.

Especially since I can now comfortably resist the urge to abbreviate “Hitchens” so that I can morph “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” into awesome, awful, impossibly terrible email title fail.