Golly gee do I love safeties. When that ref raises his hands to heaven and prays to the football gods, my bank account always says hallelujah. My dad and I scored last year (and in every other year the Super Bow1 has had a safety), and we went for it again in XLVIII. But we took it one step further. The odds on a safety happening are 6 to 1. But I found a bet where you could predict what the first or last score of the game would be. The safety was chiming in at 40 to 1. So we put all our chicken embryos in that basket, meaning a safety would be great as first of last score, but any other safety would give us a goose embryo. Twelve seconds into the game, I was dancing around the living room! S-A-F-E-T-Y Dance!

In a coincidence that only I would notice, Weird Al once parodied Safety Dance with a song about The Brady Bunch, which I was watching before the game instead of all that pre-game hype. And it was the one where Alice says she has to fly to Seattle, home of the team who scored 2 points on the safety, and is your SB48 champion. [Note: I whited out the bet # and time of bet, but even if you had that info, what could you do? Call the place and say "I won bet # xxxx and I'd like to give the money back"?]

And now onto the SB Squares contest:

DEWWWWW-EY! A longtime reader named Kim and her family go by Dewey & Co., and won quarter # 1 with an 8-0 score. At half it was 22-0, and Dewey also had the 2-0 combo, meaning she/they scored again! So that locked up 2nd and 4th prize.

The third quarter gave several people a chance in the closing seconds. With the Seahawks dominating, 36-0, Denver scored on a TD pass with no time left. That killed Fez (wacky friend/mascot/non-sports-fan to my family who probably didn't know I put him in this contest) and put my dad in great shape...until the Broncos decided to go for two. Then it was between my wife and my friend Gumby. They converted like Rod Carew, and Gumby gets the 36-8 victory. But there's more! I had put a bunch of my old-school friends in the contest and told them about it. But then I realized I left Jimmy V. out! Since Gumby doesn't care about football and wasn't even on the e-mail I'd sent to everybody, I told Jim to consider himself "Gumby" for this contest. So Jim wins the 3rd quarter, aka third prize.

Another high-school-through-now friend, "Deane," who introduced me to The Jerky Boys in our senior-year Interpersonal Communications class, got into position for the Final Score win when Seattle made it 43-8 with almost 12 minutes left in the game. That would hold up for Dean-o, aka the man with the VHS tape of the coveted hour-long Warner Wolf Plays of the Decade (the 80s). I only have the half-hour version. But that's beside the point....

So Deane will have first pick, followed by Dewey & Co., followed by Jim (unless Gumby finds out he was in the contest), followed by Dewey again. So far the prizes are the Padres yearbook and the Red Sox scorebook--I will announce the others soon and people can start choosing. (And I'll send out Ryan's prize from last year--I figured I'd wait to see if he won this year, then I could put it all in one package. Is that a good enough excuse ya think?)

Congrats to the winners. Sorry to the non-Ws, and Kara, think of yourself as a martyr for people with bad numbers--this proves anyone can win these contests.