Once your couch sores heal and you undergo a very specific form of liposuction to remove queso from the arteries nearest your heart, I hope you'll realize what you experienced the past 48 hours:
The best weekend in American sports.
The NFL playoffs provided drama (the 49ers improbably coming back to beat the Saints), upsets (the 49ers and Giants winning to advance to an improbable NFC Championship Game), emotion (49ers tight end Vernon Davis crying as he hugged his coach), story lines (the quarterback who fathered a child out of wedlock, Tom Brady, beating the quarterback who claims he's a virgin, Tim Tebow), local story lines (Matt Birk advancing to another title game) and two days that gave us all an excuse to sit inside by the fireplace pretending we'd really rather be at the gym.
You might choose another of my top 10 sports weekends ... or you might be a hockey fan.
1. NFL divisional playoffs: Four big games over two days with no overlap and the promise of real upsets. Since 1998 only one defending Super Bowl champ has made it past the divisional round.
2. The Masters: Saturday is moving day, Sunday is either rapid-cut drama or a long coronation in the most beautiful landlocked space on earth. The Masters on CBS is sport as art.
3. World Series weekends: The NFL and Major League Baseball are our two most popular sports. When they converge on fall weekends, with the NFL staging games at noon and 3 and the baseball playoffs or Series filling the night, we have our longest good sports days of the year.
4. Sweet 16: You may argue that the Final Four is more important than the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA tournament, but the Final Four can be anticlimactic, and the championship game isn't played until Monday night. The Sweet 16 gives us overlapping, channel-flipping drama, and sometimes the best story of the tournament isn't which power school wins, but which underdog makes a run.
