Missed Kicks

Sunday's NFL football championships were great games. Very closely matched teams and exciting endings. One decided in the last few minutes, the other in overtime.

I only caught the post game interviews with the 49er's and the Giants. There was a very nice interview with New York's kicker who won the game with his 31 yard field goal in overtime. The interviews I would love to have heard would be the ones with the kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who missed the tying field goal and gave the win to New England, and the interview with the the punt returner for San Francisco who bumbled two returns. One handed New York a scoring opportunity and the other handed New York the field possession needed to kick the winning goal.

It's only a game. No one got hurt. Still, I'm certain the dread and disappointment in being responsible for the losses to those respective teams must be heart wrenching, even for sometimes cocky overpaid professional athletes. The subject interests me though. Doctors have patients who die, or surgeries that don't go as planned. Pilots make errors that end careers, destroy airplanes, or kill or injure passengers. Heck, captains of ships do dumb things and scuttle large cruise ships, killing passengers and destroying magnificient vessels. People get distracted and crash their cars. The examples are probably innumerable but each is predicated on an event that probably could have been done better. Each is an event the doer would like to take back. Each is an event that will be very difficult to leave behind on the other side of a good night's sleep.

Asking the winning kicker how it feels to make that game winning kick provides little useful information. Asking the losing kicker how it feels to have missed, what went through his head as the ball shanked to the left, and how he'll cope with that; those are the questions I'd love to hear answered. Asking the Captain of the Costa Concordia how he could be so reckless is unlikely to yield much insight. Asking him how he'll live the rest of his life with that event on his head? Now that's potentially useful.

I'm interested in all this because I know how it feels. I've experienced that sense of failure and frustration. I've seen peers experience that sense of failure and frustration as well. Frankly, although I've read discussions on the subject, I've never read a satisfactory illumination of just how one quickly absolves the misery created by such ill-fated actions. I know it  starts with accepting that the event is past and cannnot be undone. But from there, it seems there's just an awful lot of ground to cover between "I caused it" and "I'm over it."