I was thinking today of my impending trip to Hawaii, around 35 days left. I was thinking of the term "running out the clock" in regards to coasting towards the trip. Then I started thinking about the phrase, "running out the clock". It's a football phrase to describe a protectionist policy. Basically, if you are up by a touchdown, and you have the ball, and there are 2 minutes left, you want to run low-risk plays that will take a lot of time and are not meant to accomplish anything, running plays, since each running play has a low probability of success, but takes up 40 secs of time. If the other team had the ball, they would be running a "hail mary" play, basically a forlorn hope that they could somehow score to tie and win the game.
It's a very logical thing to do, but it is at the core, cowardly and unsportsmanlike, especially if you are the stronger team.
The last season the 49ers won the Super Bowl, in their NFC Championship game against the Dallas Cowboys, they shot off to an early lead. Because of this, they decided to not play aggressively and to protect their lead. For the stronger and better team to choose to play timidly, that caused me to dislike them much. The behind team, who happened to be inferior, was playing aggressively, and aggressively is how the game is meant to be played. Risks are meant to be taken.
In one of my favorite series of books, the Horatio Hornblower series, the protagonist makes this quote: "Timidity is rarely the best course of action". That's how life should be lived. Not out of timidity, not out of protecting what you have, not out of circling the wagons and living in fright. But in bravery, in taking the fight to the enemy, in aggression and audacity, storming and advancing and invading...
Living as a target is not living.
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