I may or may not be ready for some football

I bid farewell to "Monday Night Football," which this week concluded its run on broadcast network television. Never a huge sports fan, I was briefly preoccupied with professional football in the mid-1990s, and I particularly liked "Monday Night Football," with its slick production and celebrity cameos. I admired the smooth delivery of play-by-play man Al Michaels, but more than that I enjoyed the theme song by Hank Williams, Jr., an inelegant rewrite of his 1984 hit "All My Rowdy Friends are Coming Over Tonight." Week after week Williams sang the tune, always with a special lyric that summed up the night's match without saying very much ("The 'Boys and the Bears are lookin' mighty tough!").

As the years passed, the segments grew more and more bizarre -- I recall one season's particularly ill-advised theme that saw Williams paired with tap dancers a la Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. Wha?