TCF Stadium has upgraded its cellphone coverage. Glorious Wi-Fi will penetrate every corner of the stadium! Your tiny arm hairs will rise in prickly anticipation as you enter! None shall experience the slightest lag when doing Internet things during a game. Huzzah!

Let's go to our old friend, Strawman McCoot:

"Why, in my day, interacting with the outside world during a game meant you had to bring your own consarned pigeons and attach a piece of paper to their leg, and if you wanted to send a 'self-o' — or an 'auto-semblance' as we called it — you had to bring a friend who could sketch quickly. 'Course, all that changed with the telegraph, and you couldn't hear the game with all the clackin' folks were doing, sending wires to friends."

You can sympathize. Someday soon no one will actually be watching the game; the purpose of the stadium will be to share the experience of sitting in a single location observing the game on small glowing rectangles. No more announcer shouting meet your Golden Gophers. It'll be LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET'S ALL TEXT A BIG CHEER TO 34-943! STANDARD MESSAGING RATES MAAAAAAY APPLY!

I'm looking at my phone all day, but the last time I went to a Gophers game — can't remember which one, but they lost, if that narrows it down — it was nice to be disconnected from everything else. Also, I was with my dad, who probably thinks the current generation would have been wiped out at Normandy because the troops would have been too busy snapping pictures of themselves getting off the landing craft.

This, however, is not war. It's just a game, and if the cellphone coverage is better, hoorah. It's 4G! When it's 57G, today's Gopher fans will recall the good old days. Why, in my time it took almost two seconds to get a game update, and we were fine with that. Kids today.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858