The 2011 National Football League (NFL) season will always be remembered as a campaign jeopardized by–and narrowly salvaged from–the owner’s lockout. Like a mass incantation, fans repeatedly bellowed on the airwaves and seethed on Internet message boards that they just wanted NFL football come September. In the heart of the stalemate last spring between the league’s avaricious billionaire owners–swine–and their millionaire players, the typical fan likely attempted to wrap their mind around an autumn and winter without America’s towering, fire-breathing sporting Godzilla. It was a haunting prospect for those bold enough to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Dear, sweet Joni Mitchell wrote and crooned the iconic words, “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s