Super bowl madness

Over the holidays, we sat at my brother-in-law’s kitchen table talking about church youth activities in Indiana and Arkansas. That cued my husband to relate a telephone conversation he’d had with their mother. She had casually mentioned to him that one of her grandsons was going to the Super Bow with the youth group.
My husband was amazed. “Wow! How do they get tickets?”
“From the youth director.”
“How did he get tickets?”
“I don’t know. The youth director makes these arrangements. He does it every year,” she brushed aside his question.
But his interest was at an all-time high. “Every year? Do you realize how much that would cost?”
“It’s only 100 to 150 people who go to Super Bowl every year, counting the chaperones that the teenagers have to have.”
“Sure,” my husband scoffed, “what man wouldn’t agree to take his sons to the Super Bowl? They probably have lots of volunteers for chaperones. How to they get there?”
“On the bus.”
“Every year?! They don’t fly to California?”
“No, they always take the bus.”
“Every year, he makes arrangements for the whole thing and they take a bus?? Even when it’s in California and New Orleans?” He was amazed.
She shrugged off his question. “I don’t keep track of these things. I just know that the youth director takes care of the whole thing. It’s an evangelistic kind of thing.”
“Evangelistic?”
“Well, yes. Everyone has to listen to a message on the bus.”
“I’m sure any drunk would listen to a message on the bus, if he got to go to the Super Bowl.” He paused and shook his head in disbelief. “This is just amazing to me. It must cost a lot of money to take 100-150 people and get a block of tickets like that. It is incredible. I wonder how they do it?”
“I don’t know how. That’s the youth director job. It’s a long trip for them. This year they are going to Indianapolis on the bus. They will leave early, stop for something to eat and have devotions on the bus. Then they will bowl all night long at this huge bowling alley in Indianapolis.”
“Bowl all night!” My husband choked on his surprise. “I thought you were talking about the Super Bowl, not an all-night bowling tournament.”
At that point, my brother-in-law looked at his mother. “I bet Mom doesn’t even know what the Super Bowl is, do you?”
She looked at him questioningly. She glanced at me and everyone sitting around the table for a clue.
Finally, she smiled hesitantly and cleared her throat. Evidently thinking back to her own sons’ activities at this time of year, she tentatively ventured, “Does it have something to do with basketball?”
The men cracked up laughing.
“No,” my husband said. “It is the play-off of the best teams of the two national professional football leagues. The equivalent of the World Series in baseball.”
But that’s another story: She also didn’t know what the World Series is all about either.