(This story is true and unbelievable! I’m thankful that there were four people in my living room who are witnesses of the insanity of this evening. I’m not crazy! This really happened.)
Kick-off at 12:30 a.m. (Spanish time)—Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Francisco 49ers!
At 1:00 a.m. Spanish time . . .
“You guys up and watching the game?” my friend texted me from the U.S.
“Yes!!! But internet streaming keeps stopping. Ugh!!!” I responded. “Go Chiefs!!”
“I hope it doesn’t do that the whole game!” she said.
“It just came back on to see the big touchdown. Ugh! It just went back down!” I answered.
“I could FaceTime our TV to you guys,” she continued, adding a smiley face at the end of the text.
“Please do!” I said.
“For real?” she asked.
For Real?!
Yes, I was serious!
We tried to watch the first quarter of the game with shouts of joy, gasps of breath, sighs of desperation, and groans of frustration.
However, every few minutes, the site we always used to stream sports games would freeze. The little, turning, white circle in the center of the TV screen didn’t reassure us.
“The site is crashing,” Timothee informed us.
“You mean it’s saturated?” I asked.
“They are probably shutting down the site because everyone is trying to stream the game.”
Disappointment
We couldn’t believe it. Our much-anticipated moment of watching the Kansas City Chiefs battle the San Francisco 49ers for the Super Bowl was here. Yet, we couldn’t quite reach it. We couldn’t quite watch the battle.
My friend’s joke in her text about FaceTiming her TV to us gave me an idea. I quickly called my mother (back in Kansas City!) on FaceTime and asked her to please turn her phone to face the TV screen. She did, and we watched the distant, pixelated images through our phone screens. We could hear the sports commentators loud and clear.
It was better than nothing.
In the meantime, we continued to get “error” messages on our streaming site. The images would disappear, then randomly pop back on for a few moments. It was hard to watch the game like this. We kept missing key plays.
We were so frustrated, but we didn’t let it keep us from enjoying and cheering. Instead, we opened up our prized bottle of Dr. Pepper (only allowed on super special occasions) and got out “Papa Vincent’s Famous French Crêpes” and Nutella. After all, it was “French Crêpe Day”!
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD “PAPA VINCENT’S FAMOUS FRENCH CRÊPES”!
Delayed
We also found that our internet streaming site was delayed from the real game. We would hear screams through my mother’s phone as the Chiefs moved the ball down the field and into the end zone.
“Touchdown!” my mother yelled into the phone.
I screamed with delight, even though the sporadic images on our TV screen in Spain did not yet reveal the touchdown and the updated score.
We would have to wait until the execution and the cheers of the successful play could cross the Atlantic Ocean to Spain.
We were in another time zone, and we were clearly “delayed.”
How About ‘Screen Share’?
I asked my mother if she could stream from her TV to her computer. If so, we could use Skype, and she could “screen share” her computer’s content.
My mother said that she was willing to help, but she would need to get her computer out of the car. She had just returned from a long road trip the night before.
“I must have left my computer at your sister’s house,” she texted me in a panic, a few minutes later.
Great! I guess we will need to find another option.
My mother kept her phone propped up on her coffee table, facing the TV, so that we could continue to watch the game through her phone screen.
It was better than nothing.
In the meantime, I texted my other friend who had originally offered to FaceTime her TV to us. I asked her if she had a way to stream the game.
“I have it pulled up on the Fox Sports website,” she answered.
Great, now we could Skype and she could “screen share” with us.
Watching in Silence
We were so excited! We had the image, but we didn’t have the sound. She made some adjustments on her end, and we had both the sound and image for about two minutes. Then, the sound suddenly cut out.
“I think the network has detected that I’m streaming the game and sharing the content,” my friend texted.
Thankfully, my friend is super techy, so she was able to click on a button that could add “subtitles” to our mute screen. Great!
However, the enthusiasm in our living room only lasted a few minutes. Subtitles are great for a foreign language film at the cinema. However, watching an exciting Super Bowl with no commentators—only written subtitles—was far from enjoyable.
We needed an Option #3.
A Zoom conference call, instead of Skype, was our next attempt. Same thing! It just didn’t work! We couldn’t seem to receive both the image and the audio through the screen share feature.
Password Problems
My mother texted me that she had finally located her computer in her suitcase. She tried to log into her Xfinity (cable television) account to stream the game, but she couldn’t recall her password.
Ugh! Passwords! Don’t you hate them?
“I’ll call Xfinity at half-time,” my mother said. “I want to watch the game.”
In the meantime, we continued to watch the game through the hit-or-miss streaming site that kept popping on and off. We would start to watch a play, and then miss what happened. Somehow, we would have to fill in the blanks and the missing puzzle pieces in our minds.
At half-time, my mother called her cable company to retrieve her password. She got into her account on her computer and was able to livestream the game. Great! However, connecting to Skype or Zoom and screen sharing would have resulted in the same thing. We would see the image, but not have a sound.
“Let’s watch the good image from my mom’s computer on Skype and keep the sound on our streaming site,” I suggested to everyone sitting in our living room.
“The audio will be delayed from the images,” David explained. “It will be painful to watch.”
He was right!
My mother suggested that we try to log into her Xfinity account on our computer. Great idea! We could then connect our computer to the TV with the HDMI cord and watch it from there. That’s what we were already doing with the streaming site we were using.
We tried multiple times to log into my mother’s account. It didn’t work. The system could detect that we were out of the country. We turned on our VPN (Virtual Private Network) in order to mask our location in Spain. The cyberspace system was much more intelligent than our VPN. It still didn’t work.
Surrender
We finally gave up and decided to just stream what we could from the website, through our computer, and on to the
J. Lo and Shakira were dancing wildly on the stage. We laughed as the music stopped suddenly every few minutes, and their bodies would freeze in the strangest of positions.
My mother kept us up-to-date through texts, and we asked Siri regularly for a current score.
Then, suddenly, our live-streaming site kicked into full gear and worked flawlessly. It was truly a miracle! Timothee chuckled, because I kept praying aloud, “God, please make a way for us to watch this game!”
In any case, it was a miracle!
We opened up the prized bottle of Dr. Pepper (only allowed on super special occasions) and got out the French crêpes and Nutella. After all, it was “French Crêpe Day”!
With continued shouts of joy, gasps of breath, and sighs of desperation, we watched the Chiefs fight with all their hearts to make one of the most beautiful comebacks we have ever seen.
31-20!
It was a wild night! We all crawled into bed at 4:40 a.m. Spanish time. In only a few hours, our alarms would ring to awaken us to a new day—school, work, and life again on our side of the ocean.
—THE CULTURAL STORY-WEAVER
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Did you watch the Super Bowl and cheer and Kansas City Chiefs onto victory! Did you have any
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