It occurred to me shamefully late in the weekend I could have watched multiple games at once with this TV….but at least I remembered I could use it to watch the end of a game while I was making dinner on Friday.

(Sunday Paper, Year VI, Issue 12)

It’s funny, this week I was going to take stock of why I write the Sunday Paper.

I figure there are enough new people coming along for the ride who probably haven’t gone all the way back to the first post to see what I wrote then that might appreciate a quick little history.

Why I started writing the Sunday Paper, why I do it every week, that sort of thing.

And then towards the end of this week I got super into the NCAA Tournament and I got the itch to write about that…and the more I think about baseball the more I feel like writing about that…

And, as it turns out, that’s all pretty relevant to the origins of the Sunday Paper.

First of all, I guess, if you care to read the first post in this iteration of the Sunday Paper, you can click here.

And I say “this iteration” because this is the second life of the Sunday Paper.

It started as a sports blog on another site. (Two sites, actually. I wrote it as a personal little blog and then it got picked up by a national blogging network for a few years and I actually got a little money for it. Very little money..but it was cool to get anything for something that I started for free and didn’t expect anything to come from.)

I wrote multiple times a week to vent about the Mets and the Jets or whatever was on my mind in the sports world, and then I had kids and it dwindled down to one meaty piece once a week, on Sundays. I called it the ‘Sunday Paper’ as a kind of tribute to those Sunday articles I loved reading so much by Mike Lupica in the Daily News growing up, and Peter Gammons and Will McDonough in the Boston Globe when I moved here.

Then, in 2013, I spent a year writing about “new things” - I did something new every day and had a year of posts that added up to “365 New Things in 2013.” (You can see those [in reverse order] at this link.)

And then when that year was done I kind of had an itch to write but nowhere to do it. And after I started freelance writing and performing comedy and I built this site I thought the Sunday Paper might be a good way to hold myself accountable week to week and write about my progress in both writing and comedy and here we are six years and 11 weeks later.

It’s been very different for this past year.

There hasn’t been much to report on in the way of comedy…but I have been writing, and the fact that I write this every week is no small thing.

It keeps my brain working and gets me to write for at least this much every week for years. (Besides the occasional guest posts.)

I used to celebrate milestones frequently on the other blog. A couple of hundred posts in a year, that sort of thing.

I haven’t done that yet here, but it’s crossed my mind every now and again - usually after the fact that I probably had recently passed a milestone.

But I’ve been thinking ahead, and if I’ve done roughly 52 posts a year for 5 years (I haven’t - that first year was shy of 52…I’ll have to get the exact number)…we’re closing in on 300.

That seems like something worth recognizing.

Maybe we’ll start counting down to 300 too. That could be fun.

But thanks for reading each week, and if you’re here for the first time thanks for checking it out. I hope you come back.

I haven’t run out of ideas for six years so far.

And I’m not planning on doing so anytime soon.

Notes

*Perhaps you saw my Every Week On Wednesday post, but this year I’m not doing an NCAA Tournament bracket. (First time since 1993…I really used to love the tournament but last year was rough…it’s a whole thing.) I did decide, though, without a bracket influencing my thoughts, I might give a survivor pool a whirl. I did this once before - and picked Virginia the year they became the only 1 seed to lose to a 16 seed. (In fairness, the only reason I picked them in the first round was because I wasn’t buying them as a very good 1 seed and didn’t think they’d be around long. So I wasn’t entirely misguided.) This year has already been better - I’m alive in the round of 32.

*And - pools and brackets aside - I’ve been really enjoying watching the basketball so far this tournament. Texting with my friends on Thursday about the Oral Roberts upset of Ohio State was just about the most normal things have felt this past year.

*I mentioned the Wednesday post - every week (on Wednesday) I’ve been posting a little something - a picture and a story, just a picture, that sort of thing - on the Facebook page just to keep the activity up there. I don’t quite understand the Facebook algorithms. I don’t know that those get a whole lot of exposure on people’s timelines. But I will continue to do it. If you want to see them, go ahead and Like the Facebook page here. (And I think you can even set the page to show up at the top of your timeline when something new is posted. Maybe you should do that too.) And you can follow me on Twitter here. That’s also fun.

*One more thing about the NCAA Tournament - everything is centered in Indiana this year. And everyone is staying in Indianapolis. What’s cool about this is about a decade ago my brother and my dad and I went to Indianapolis to celebrate a milestone birthday for my dad. We went to see the Jets play the Colts, and had a nice little weekend in Indianapolis. (It was especially nice because the Jets upset the Colts on their way to the playoffs…I believe the Colts were 14-0 at the time and they ended up 14-2?) Anyway, on game day we walked through a skywalk towards the new football stadium near a new convention center and I think the skywalk came to a dead end because the convention center wasn’t fully built yet. Something like that. But this is where everything is centered for the tournament and it’s cool to see some of the shots of downtown Indy because everything that was being built then has since being completed and I recognize a lot of the hotels and facilities.

*I should specify, of course, that when I refer to the NCAA Tournament above I have been referring to the men’s tournament. The women have a similar set-up in San Antonio (I’ve never been there), or at least should have a similar set-up but have had to raise a stink to make sure their situation was up to snuff with that of the men. I try to seek out some women’s games each year but admit that I fall victim to favoring the men’s tournament because it’s easier to find and follow and it always has been. I guess it’s progress that more and more people are starting to realize that…but it’s past time for all of that to change.

*I mentioned in the introduction that I have a baseball-writing hankering too. I guess that comes with the territory in late March. It’s prime baseball season excitement time and I finally subscribed to The Athletic, so I’ve been reading Joe Posnanski’s team previews. I’ve always loved his writing and reading his stuff was one of the reasons I subscribed. (I think they’re still doing a $1/mo. subscription rate deal right now….which started the day after my subscription kicked in for full price. Whomp whomp.) I would love to write fun little baseball previews about each team like he’s doing.

*Here’s something fun to do Thursday night: Matt’s having an album release show. It’s at the Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock and the album is great, so the music will be good, and he always puts on a good show so I’m sure it’ll be worth your time. Here’s the link to the Facebook event page, through which you can get tickets. All you need to buy and then access is your e-mail address. Funny, too, if you clicked through to that first Sunday Paper there’s a tweet in there from the Counting Crows singing Matt’s praises. That was five years ago…and it’s still true today, with Adam Duritz adding some vocals on this new album. So you never know. Maybe there will be a surprise guest or two. I guess there’s only one way to find out…

*Haha. Singing his praises.

*Last note about the original Sunday Paper: Did you notice the expanded ‘Sunday Paper’ graphic that I’ve been using a trimmed version of for five years? Turns out Kevin never made a newer graphic for me.