Simultaneous Dynasty Demises

[Originally written for The Roar, May 1, 2017 - Australian Football magazine section]

            One of my children’s favorite things to tease me about, as an American with a footy addiction, is that because of the time zone difference, I enjoy my Saturday afternoon games on Friday night, for example. Therefore, I’m listening to news from the future! (“The world can’t end tonight – Dad’s already listening to tomorrow.”)

            So, understand that when I tell you I was listening to the end of two dynasties simultaneously on Friday night, I’m referring to the events at the University of Tasmania and the MCG on Saturday afternoon, local time.

            To witness the end of a dynasty is a rare thing, because by definition dynasties themselves are rare. Having two clubs that you could consider simultaneous dynasties requires not only that the teams be unusually dominant over a period of five or ten years, but that they both win multiple titles despite the other team’s similar success.

            Hawthorn won three consecutive titles in 2013-15, a fourth back in 2007, and made finals in nine of the last ten years, including being top three the last six years straight. Sydney made finals in 13 of the last 14 years, although they won just two titles in that time. They’ve also been top four with a double chance each of the last five years, and made grand finals in three of those five years. Throw Geelong in there, whose record over the last ten years is similar, and there are arguably three semi-dynasties in the 2010s in the AFL.

            And on Friday night, two of those dynasties came crashing down at the same time, on competing channels. 

            Both teams started the season 0-4, to everyone’s surprise, but there was still hope. The Hawks rose from the dead in Round 5, wiping out finalist West Coast by fifty points while featuring most of the premiership stars, and the obituaries were put on hold for a few days. Meanwhile, fixture watchers looked at rounds 6-10 for the Swans, projected five easy wins, and reminded us that the one team with a track record of rising from the dead to reach finals was Sydney. So as late as Friday (morning, for me), there was still life in those two cadavers. “They’ll get better! They may not make it to the top 8, but they’re still decent!”

            And then, Round Six happened. 

            The Hawthorn/St. Kilda game began at 9:45 pm Friday night in my Idaho time zone in the US. As usual, I put my kids to bed, settled in at my computer, and pulled up the broadcast on one screen, knowing the Sydney rout of Carlton would be available a half hour later. Cyril Rioli was out, but c’mon: the Hawks never lose in Launceston! The Saints started out well, but they weren’t putting the Hawks away when they had their chances: even leading 15-5 in the inside 50 count, they were only up 3.5 to 2.1. Then the Josh Bruce goal at the halftime siren put them up double, 44-22, and the CrownBet odds started creeping higher and higher.

            Meanwhile, Sydney was struggling to impart their obvious superiority over the youngsters of Carlton, even losing the lead briefly in the second, before taking a slim eight-point lead into the long break. It was easy to blame the wet conditions, the kind that allows underdogs to stay close and the conditions that allowed the Blues their only win in round three.

            As the final hour of Friday came and went, so did the chances of the two old powerhouses. First, we watched Hawthorn do something unbelievable against St. Kilda in the third: they gave up. The phrase “scored at will” was invented for St. Kilda’s third quarter. With just 18 inside-50s, they scored 8.5.53, to the one-goal-one by the Hawks, and yet, they also doubled the Hawks’ tackle count, 16-8. The poor announcers struggled mightily to find some parallel for the total surrender Hawthorn displayed on their happy hunting grounds in Tasmania.

            Had they had the Swans broadcast on in the booth, they would have found their parallel: Sydney surrendered five straight goals to a team they’d been favored to beat by 37 points…to a team Port had just defeated by ninety…to a team which would set a new high score for the season by the end of the night. They closed the lead to nine with a quarter to go, and we foolishly thought they would still reel in the ‘obviously inferior’ Carlton team.

            Back on the island, the last death spasms ran through the muscles of the Hawks: Jarryd Roughhead and Luke Breust put fourteen points on the board to start the fourth, at the same moment Sydney was closing to nine.  

           Let the record show that at approximately 15:30 local time on Saturday afternoon, April 29^th, 2017, both franchise dynasties breathed their last.

            Because after that, Hawthorn gave up five more goals, every one easier than the last, and lost by an astonishing 75 points to a team they were favored to beat. Meanwhile, Sydney allowed the Blues to rip off the first three goals to start the fourth, and the Swans never really threatened after that – unless you count the ghosts of Bloods Past that the announcers and Sydney fans kept trying to invoke to make us feel that this team was in some way related to those championship clubs.

            But they’re not. They have some of the same players, but the page has turned. Carlton, a six-to-seven goal underdog who hadn’t beaten Sydney since 2011, won by 19. 

All dynasties die eventually. The UCLA men’s college basketball dynasty ended when their coach retired. The Soviet hockey team and the American basketball team stopped winning every gold medal when their own internal systems changed, and the rest of the world caught up. The New York Yankees stopped winning every other World Series after 1964. And someday, the University of Connecticut will stop being the bellcow of women’s basketball teams, the New England Patriots will lose both coach Bill Belechick and quarterback Tom Brady and return to being ordinary, and the Perth Wildcats will not make the NBL finals. 

What was so amazing was to watch both obituaries write themselves simultaneously. The only two examples I could come up with of something close to “simultaneous dynasty death” were both much more predictable than this one, and neither were all that “together”.

In 1991, in our stateside National Basketball Association, the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics had dominated the NBA for a decade behind three or four star players, but in particular the Lakers’ Magic Johnson and the Celtics’ Larry Bird, rivals since the famous 1979 NCAA college basketball title game they first met in. But Bird retired that year, his team having drifted from the top rung and not made finals for a couple of years, and Magic’s sudden retirement because of his HIV-positive status left the Lakers in a lurch, and they didn’t return to the finals until the days of Kobe and Shaq, once Michael Jordan retired. The two teams didn’t collapse at the same time, or even the same year.

The other possibility might be in Major League Baseball, where the “Big Red Machine” of the Cincinnati Reds dominated the National League while the eccentric Oakland A’s dominated the American League during the same time period: 1970-1976. In that run, the Reds won five division titles, including four league championships and consecutive World Series titles in 1975-76. The A’s won five straight division titles, from 1971-75, and three straight World Series titles from 1972-74. But after their division title and failure to advance beyond the league championship series (not to mention because their owner at the time was a notorious skinflint), they traded away significant talent and fell from the ranks of the great teams, pre-empting the demise of the Reds by a couple of years.

So what we witnessed this weekend was unprecedented. The only way to “top” it? If Geelong’s loss to Collingwood ends up being the first of, say, a seventeen game losing streak to end the season…

While on these Weekly Wanderings, it was hard not to notice the common thread between the two teams: complete collapses on defense. By the second half of each game, Hawthorn and Sydney were both engaged in the finger-pointing and the saving-energy for offense attitude that engulfs losing teams. Neither club’s defense will improve until the players get out of their current “me first” mode and return to the “we” attitudes that were evident in the classic Giants/Bulldogs game the night before. (Or, in my case, at 4 a.m. on Friday morning. And worth every moment of lost sleep!)

An excerpt - why God is so accurate with prophecy

This is an excerpt from a book I'm writing, The Universe In Twelve Dimensions, the express purpose of which is to demonstrate that everything science is learning about the universe matches up with what God tells us in Scripture is the case. The protagonist of the story is the Bible study teacher in this sequence, and this is a Sunday morning class of his. Enjoy!

Church services on Sunday were uneventful. We spent more time on Daniel nine this week, focusing on the purpose of the prophecy contained in the final four verses therein.

“I got to thinking,” I began, “that we spent so much time last week talking about what prophecy was, and its purpose being in the Bible at all is. So, right here IN the book of Daniel, in fact immediately before the chapter that we were reading. Flip back over to Daniel 9, to the segment right before Daniel 10 that we’ve been looking at these last two sessions, and let’s read verses 24 thought 27. These,” I add partly in buildup and partly to give them time to find the passage, “are perhaps the most important prophecies about the End Times in the Old Testament:

 “Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”

“Oh, what does all of that even mean?”

“Well, Doris, let’s try to break it down. There’s a lot about readin’ text that’s 2600 years old that we can still relate to today, but there are other places that it helps to understand the customs or such of the place and time so we can put it in our 21^st century minds a little better.

“The seventy ‘weeks’ are actually seventy ‘weeks of years’, not of days, or in other words seventy seven-year segments. So ‘seventy sevens to finish the transgression’ and all of that means 490 years before the Messiah comes to finish up the human race’s crimes against God by those six methods there in verse 24. Then he splits them up. There’s going to be a set of seven ‘weeks’, or 49 years, that they ‘restore and build Jerusalem’ – that’s the length of time from his writing until the second group of returning prisoners from Babylon finish doing exactly that, precisely 49 years later. Another prophecy fulfilled.  The next set is sixty-two sevens, or 434 years, until ‘an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing’. So that’s sixty-nine of the seventy weeks, 483 years, and that number gets us to Christ’s first coming. Amazingly, He arrives for the Triumphant Entry exactly on the DAY of that prediction, exactly 483 years later, the Anointed One presenting Himself to be ‘cut off’ on that day.”

“No. That’s not possible.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Hank. I know. I didn’t believe it until I did the math myself while I was an undergrad here at SAGU. Every one of those multi-year prediction things comes true precisely, no matter what the prophecy was. That’s one of the most tangible proofs we have of God.”

The awed silence in the room was SO satisfying as a teacher.

"I wish I could tell you the next part was as clean as that one; there's no definition of the break between the first sixty-nine sevens and the beginning of the seventieth. But there's definitely a break, because he talks about...ah, yes, here in verse 26:

And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war.

And THEN comes the covenant for the last week. Of course, what actually happens is that very soon the "people of the prince" - the Jews - fight back, and Rome utterly destroys Jerusalem. Just as Jesus had predicted at the start of Matthew 24, leading into HIS version of the End of Days, no two stones will remain atop each other. Something like that."

            Priscilla stared at her Bible like she was going to see through to the cover.

“See, that wouldn’t have even made sense to the people Isaiah was saying it to! ‘They’ll come destroy the city!! And then you’ll have the sacrifices going when the next problem hits!’ That wouldn’t have even made sense to them, would it?”

I had to smile at this. She couldn’t have set me up any better had I given her the question before class!

“Priscilla, THAT is one of the very best proofs for God’s validity through the Scripture. When WE write stories, or statements, with a political or historical bent – or for ANY reason, I suppose! – we do so aiming at what audience? Our CURRENT clients, the people who will read it right away.

“If the Bible were faked, by ordinary people of the time, it would have had signs of being written to satisfy the people it was most directly trying to fake. However, most of the time, it was NOT good news for them. One of my favorite Bible jokes isn’t really a joke at all: A kid asks his dad how he knows the Bible’s real. Without missing a beat, Dad replies, ‘Mark 11, verses 13 and 14’, and drops the subject. Kid goes and looks it up. Wait a sec, gotta find it. OK, here it is:

And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, He went to see if He could find anything on it. When He came to it, He found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And His disciples heard it.

“The kid brings the verses back to Dad, and Dad replies, ‘Yep, that’s it,’ and the kid says, ‘I don’t get it.’

“Dad’s reply is priceless, and I think it’s essentially right: ‘Son, if you or I were writing about Jesus, we’d want to make sure He looked as good as He could, so everyone would worship Him, right?’ Son agrees. ‘But these guys didn’t DO that. They included a story like this, that kinda makes the Son of God look like a bit of a jerk, y’know? So, if stuff like that made it into the Gospels, I’m going to believe the rest of it’s true, too.’

“My point is, there’s a ton of stuff like Mark 11 here that isn’t what you’d include if ALL you’re worried about is making points with the audience of the time.

“But GOD writes with an Eye towards the audience He needs to read it LATER. Revelation chapters two and three do this. Sometimes, He even writes out predictions that come true TWICE, in two different eras, under two completely different sets of people and circumstances. Daniel 11 will be a great example of that later on in our studies, Priscilla, probably two or three weeks from now.

“This goes back to something that I left you with a terrible answer to last week, Doris. When you asked how God could see all of time at once, I basically shoved the question aside by saying something like, ‘Because He’s God, that’s why!’, and that’s not really an answer at all. So let me try to give you something better.

“We don’t know HOW He does it. But I think it’s a matter of dimensions. We can only experience one dimension of time – we can only go in one direction, forward, at one speed, 60 minutes per hour. But just like we can look at an entire field at once, because we can see in three dimensions of space at once, God sees in more than one time dimension at once, So he sees us, I think, as if he sees ALL of our lives at once, and in fact the whole of creation at once, too.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t change things as we go – but God sees the changes, just like we’d see the changes in a chess board. I don’t know if this is a perfect analogy; well, I’m pretty sure it isn’t, I guess. But is it a little better than what I gave you last week, Doris?”

“It is, thank you. That does make more sense to me.”

“Me too,” chimed her husband Stanley. “I was frustrated more by the question than your answer, but that answer helps a ton, kid. Thanks.”

             Good deed for the day accomplished. Achievement unlocked.