Football's Hot Stove

The stove is still a stove, I guess, and people still are talking.
A number doubtless celebrate while, doubtless, some are squawking.
But do they talk of baseball's past and baseball yet to be?
I think they don't so much these days. Can it be only me
Who feels that football's taken center stage, and left, and right,
And shouldered baseball out of bounds if not clear out of sight?

It's March. The Super Bowl is barely over, yet it seems
That football, absent until August, fills the gurgling streams
Of call-in shows and sections of the paper labeled "sports,"
It's all "which end will end up where" and unconfirmed reports
Of teams that need a running back or coaches who need hiring,
Or dunder-header ownership, or coaches who need firing.

Where once we were a nation that would greet the hint of spring
With talk of prospects ripe to show us what they all might bring
As they came up from Triple A and made it to the Show,
We mumble now of football guys and where they're going to go…
Despite the fact that they won't take the field until the fall.
I wonder, sometimes, what the heck has happened to us all…
That we should see as headline news the Anquan Boldin trade,
A strange transaction, odd as any any champ has made,
For Baltimore, where late the guy had played a starring role,
Were winners when they played the Niners in the Super Bowl,
And now they've gone and sent this Boldin to the team they beat.
Does this not tempt the football gods to hand them a defeat
When next the Ravens meet the Niners somewhere down the line?
The trade for Ravens fans is surely somewhere south of fine,
Because it's not like Baltimore blew San Francisco out.
They won by three and late into the game, it was in doubt.
Would you, in that same circumstance, send Anquan Boldin to
The team that nearly caught you at the end? I mean, would you?
Oops. Now I've gone and done it. I've talked football in the spring.
Lord, help me. Lord help baseball, too, the game that once was king.