Time zones versus end zones

Cairns is 15 hours ahead of the East coast. This means that Sunday games become Monday games for me. And generally games that happen during work at that. Sunday's AFC championship game then was aired here live at 6am. Not an ideal time for me, since I don't get ESPN, and I didn't know of any bars available at that hour.

But luckily it was rebroadcast at 9pm on Monday, so after carefully avoiding all American media for the day, I was able to enjoy the game 13 hours after it was played in suspenseful ignorance of its outcome. And I was happy with this arrangement with the exception that they did cut a few "inconsequential" minutes from the game to make it fit in the alotted 3 hour slot, but kept all the commercials.

All was going according to plan. The defense was playing quite well. I was even explaining the game ("gridiron" as it's refered to here) to my Aussie friends. That was until 10:50pm, when we discovered the bar we were enjoying the game at was closing, and there was still an hour to go. We wandered out to another bar with two large projection screens. One of which was playing the NFC game and had some very vocal, very large fans. I wasn't about to ask them to change the station. But the other screen was showing doubles from the Aussie Open, and no one was watching it. However, my pleas to change the station fell on deaf ears. Of course the Australian tennis was going to be showed, couldn't I just be satisfied with the NFC game? No.

So off we wandered, trying another bar which was closed. Really, I thought that backpackers knew no day of the week. Why weren't these bars open? Finally we found the game on at the casino. Seated at a closed blackjack table, we watched the last 10 minutes of the game, and the pats clinch the championship.

Now for the superbowl. I'm tempted to just take the day off. The game will air live at 9am on Monday here. That's reasonable right? Maybe I could just call in sick?