Congratulations, you survived a season of ‘Thursday Night Football’

Thursday night is the weekend’s appetizer. It’s the cocktail hour before the sit-down gala, the amuse-bouche that arrives before your seven-course meal. It’s the day of the week when you can get away with going out for one beer with coworkers, then look up to realize you’re at the third bar of the night and have inadvertently crashed the after-party of a funeral. Everyone is eulogizing this seemingly great guy you didn’t know, and now you’re stuck in the back of the bar until the speeches end, because it would be inappropriate to get up and walk out. Not that that has ever happened to anyone who works at SB Nation.

When it comes to Thursday night, to quote either Cris Collinsworth or Al Michaels at one point last night (but I can’t remember which one), “all bets are off.” Thursday could be the best night of the week, or you might find yourself fighting through Friday thinking, “I did this to myself.”

I bring all of this up because last night’s matchup between the Eagles and the Giants was our last Thursday Night Football game of 2016*. And, speaking of funerals, it might’ve been our last Thursday Night Game ever.

*Update: The last TNF game on an ~*~*actual~*~* Thursday, that is. Somehow the Ravens-Steelers game on Sunday afternoon is a TNF game. Because that is a thing that makes sense.

So, let’s eulogize TNF, even though this year it was largely a fitting metaphor for the bad kind of Thursday night, the kind where you should’ve actually left after that first beer. The Color Rush uniforms even made the players look like bottles of Gatorade, as though the NFL knew we’d need electrolytes the morning after (the uniforms also made guys look like grown men in footie pajamas — the only man who should ever be wearing head-to-toe purple is Prince, and Prince is dead now because everything is awful).

Since the NFL seems to be doing its best to spread its tentacles across every day of the week, TNF turned games that might’ve been “meh” Sunday afternoon matchups into marquee events. The broadcast was a money grab, which is — since it wasn’t ever really about the football in the first place — how you explain the fact that the American people were subjected to a Jags-Titans game during primetime. In the words of Richard Sherman, it has largely been a “poop-fest.”

However. For as much as I’ve complained about the quality of the football, I have to admit that football is good at making you appreciate the communal experience of football. When a primetime game is on, you know everyone else who’s watching the NFL is watching what you’re watching. It’s comforting on some dumb, sport-centric, completely meaningless, and yet highly existential level to know that so many other people are enraged about the same pass interferences as they go uncalled.

I think it’s important that we take a look back at some of the most memorable moments of the potentially last season’s least memorable games. Please play the YouTube video of Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” (with lyrics) that I have embedded below as we look back.

The first game of the season was a rematch of last year’s Super Bowl. And the Panthers lost again. But this game wasn’t remarkable because of the level of play, but rather due to the amount of times Cam Newton got rocked in the head, and the amount of times nothing was done about it. It launched the season trend where the NFL’s most sartorially blessed quarterback got hit the hardest and the most of any other quarterback.

This was, like, a whatever game. The thing I remember about this game is that they weren’t wearing red and green, they were wearing white and red. Because last year colorblind people couldn’t tell which team was which. Small victories, NFL. Good on you.

Circling back to talking about funerals, remember when the Patriots, playing with their backup quarterback’s backup, shut out Brock Osweiler and his merry band of Texans? Osweiler reminds me of one of the Ents from The Lord of the Rings (never read the books, just watched the movies, come @ me). You know what I’m talking about? Those very tall tree people that lumber around before those trolls, or orcs, or whatever they’re called (again, didn’t read the books) manage to lasso their limbs with ropes and fuck with their center of gravity until they topple? Man, they take so long to fall. Like 15 weeks.

This was not a memorable game other than the fact that the Dolphins’ Color Rush uniforms made them look like anthropomorphized Cheetos.

I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that someone is named Blaine Gabbert.

Philip Rivers threw for 178 yards and one touchdown. This meant that he passed Hall of Famer Dan Fouts and become San Diego’s career passing leader. Which, I don’t know, maybe that’s saying something? Also, this win for the Chargers (which I always want to say in a Boston accent — “Chahgahs”) arguably saved Mike McCoy’s job.

Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler were supposed to face off in some epic Midwestern Battle of the White Guys, but they didn’t, because Cutler was hurt. So the matchup ended up being Rodgers vs. Brian Hoyer. None of this matters, really, because Rodgers sucked, even though the Packers still won, because the Bears managed to suck more.

I felt like the NFL was trolling me when I found out this was actually one of the Thursday games.

I don’t remember anything about this game.

I watched this in a dive bar and I’m pretty sure I was at least five million whiskeys deep by the time it even started. Talk about a Thursday night: This was the week of the election, so we, as a nation, were two days into Trump’s America and I was two days into the biggest doom-driven bender I’ve been on since college. I therefore couldn’t tell you much about this game except that it was somewhat cathartic to watch guys run into each other for a few hours. Also, the Browns are a metaphor for America right now. We just keep taking so many goddamn Ls.

Oh god, this was that horrible game where Luke Kuechly suffered that horrible concussion and we all just had to watch as he cried uncontrollably on the field. The next day, Kuechly’s teammate Thomas Davis posted an Instagram of Kuechly to show us Kuechly was OK, but instead of looking OK, he looked very not OK.

There was so much Thursday football on Thanksgiving, because there’s always so much Thursday football on Thanksgiving. So, we’re going to skip this because it wasn’t a true TNF experience.

This was the game where you could hear NFL execs exhaling sighs of relief in their Manhattan skyscrapers all the way from Kansas. Because this, my friends, was the most watched TNF game ever. Which must’ve been nice for the suits after a season of thinkpieces about why the NFL ratings were down.

It was during Week 14 that we learned Alex Smith can actually throw a deep ball or two! Derek Carr didn’t perform the way he was supposed to, but, when your pinky is sticking out of the side of your hand, I can imagine throwing a football would be hard.

Ahhhh, poor Jeff Fisher. He didn’t even get to set the record for having the most losses of any NFL coach because the Rams sacked him a few days before the game against the Seahawks. Which is funny, because the Seahawks were, like, the one team Fisher could ever beat. It was also the game that I noticed they started playing the Law and Order: SVU theme song during challenges. Also, the Seahawks’ all-green uniforms were the funniest things I’ve seen grown men wear since the Dolphins’ wore their color rush doodads.

Welp, Eli Manning got the Giants a big ol’ L by ending the game on an interception, which is both a great metaphor for Manning’s season, TNF in general, and, hey, 2016.

Happy holidays, everyone. We did it.