It is both strange and sad to go to a wake when you don’t yet know whether your loved one is actually gone.
Such was the disorienting melancholy of attending the San Diego Chargers’ last game in existence on New Year’s Day. Fans anticipated — and were proven right a dozen days later — that Dean Spanos, the team’s owner, would uproot our franchise of five decades and haul it a hundred miles north at season’s end.
This made the 2017 Chargers calendars, handed out just beyond the stadium gates, a cruel irony — like some paramour preceding a break-up by pegging pictures to all the months you wouldn’t be spending together.