A Win?!

As of Sunday, December 1st, there were two tailgating opportunities left until the big one, the last one at the dome, the one and only, Cherrie Jones Tailgating party.  Because of this, we decided that we want to tailgate one more time in our lot and one more time walking around and in other people's lots.  We decided that we'd walk around this time so the first lot we went to was to our high school friend's parking lot.  Yep, M and I both have high school friends that have tickets together even though M and I went to different schools and we're 3 years apart.  It was kind of weird making that discovery many years ago.

We met up with my friends Chris and Scott and M's friend Todd, AKA Sea Bass.  Not sure about that one. We didn't stay too long with them but continued to walk around looking at everyone else's setup when M ran into another high school friend named Jesse.  At this time we were playing phone tag with M's other friend Wayne who happened to be out there too and in our usual lot looking for us.

We eventually made our way back to our regular tailgate lot and found Wayne and Tyler and didn't spend much time with them either as they had free beers coming their way on the plaza.  I did manage to get a picture and we did get time to play with the random dog that was hanging around. 

This dog was fun, playful and very smart.  He had a tennis ball and he wanted to play with anyone that would play with him.  He would catch the tennis ball in his mouth when thrown to him and then give it back to you to do it again.  M played with him until his glove was full of dog saliva. 

We played the Chicago Bears and in my experience seeing the Bears live, those games have been some of my favorite.  I'm not sure why but I almost always have fun at those games.  Maybe it's because most often, we win against them at home.  

I had a feeling that we were going to win this game as I had picked the Vikings to win in my Pick'ems league but as the game started and went on, it turned out to be a pretty boring game.  Ponder went out at one point with concussion-like symptoms, a reason we didn't know while we were at the game.  Cassel steps in and starts performing, at least more than Ponder did, which we all know that happens, besides the coaches apparently.  

The 4th quarter gets interesting when it's tied and we end up going into overtime, something we just did the week before with the Packers and ended up in a tie. It was a series of bloopers for both teams that kept giving each other's team another chance to score to win the game including a winning field goal wiped out by a face mask penalty and another missed one by our reliable Blair Walsh and a bad coaching decision on the Bears side to kick a field goal on 2nd and 7...and miss. The back and forth of each team having three possessions was really bizarre.  Eventually, Vikings end up winning with less than 2 minutes on the clock in OT, 23-20.  

Adrian Peterson hit two milestones that day.  He ran for a total of 211 yards, the 5th time in his career he's gotten over 200 yards in a game as well as passing the 10,000 yards mark in his career.  He did it in 101 games and is the 3rd fastest person to do it besides his two heroes, Eric Dickerson and Jim Brown.  I've seen multiple Adrian records being broken at home and I'm happy that he was able do it in front of a home crowd.

To celebrate the win, M and I had bear chops for dinner.  Take that, Chicago!