“He might have something there,” reported fellow spectator Fred Delong, “but this is football, and I don’t have the time to parse out the subtleties of his allusions and nuanced wordplay. Did they get a first down or didn’t they?”

Donnellson’s wife Maria agreed. “It’s just unnecessary," commented Maria. “I could handle ‘All’s fair in love and football,’ or ‘Dropped the ball like a sack of flour,’ but this is just out of hand.”

She added, "I mean, what does Persephone’s abduction have to do with a five yard penalty? I don’t get it.”

“We came here to watch a football game, not to draw an intimate connection between our national psyche and our ‘bread and circuses,’ as it were,” added Daniel Moser, one of many who were thrown by the audacity of Donnellson’s figure of speech.

The metaphor, while perhaps appropriate for a literary journal or a short story that high school students would have to analyze, ultimately dragged an otherwise lighthearted afternoon into a hyper-academic malaise from which it has yet to fully recover.

“Pass the potato chips,” said Donnellson. “Or should I say, the middle class.”