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This plodding pundit spent a considerable portion of Monday evening in the company of his sainted mother, who has requested anonymity.

I was upstairs. She was downstairs.

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The signal on her TV (the good one) was about 10 seconds ahead of the set I was watching — the one that is so outdated that it still shows Ed Sullivan every Sunday night.

Suddenly, there was screaming. My keen senses, carefully honed over 54 years as an earthling, told me that high-pitched screeching was not necessarily a good thing.

The noise emanating from downstairs had just finished echoing when, on the upstairs TV, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes completed one of the six touchdown passes he threw in Monday’s 54-51 NFL loss to the Cleveland/Los Angeles/Anaheim/St. Louis/Back To Los Angeles Rams.

By the time the game was over, 84-years-young G. Helen Vanstone-Mather was as exhausted as any of the participants. Rare was the play that did not elicit some sort of verbal, emotional response from the world’s finest football fan.