40 Year Old Playoff Virgin

That buzzing you hear isn’t the bees atop the Palazzo in Cremona, it is the feeling that after 40 years, it is Giorgio’s time.

To be a Beekeeper, you must have patience and a high threshold for pain. So it is little surprise that Giorgio carries on with equanimity in the DelFL despite countless losing seasons, never winning a Brown Jacket or even a single playoff game. The Italian goes into every season knowing that his Tight End will have an alphabetical-CL knee injury in the first few weeks. He knows very well that there are info-vultures circling above him, waiting to feast on what they perceive as, wrongly, an Italian internet lacking the same information as everywhere else. In his old age, Giorgio has seen every way one can lose in fantasy, but every year he shows up stung and scarred, just for that one shot at a Championship.

Yet, as Giorgio turns 40 this coming Thursday, there is palpable optimism in the air around Cremona that the hard work of these past few decades might finally produce some award winning honey. There was certainly hard work put in this offseason as his draft yielded a highly competitive roster led by the Queen Bee (or QB) of the Brown Sugar Pies: Patrick Mahomes. But as any apiarist knows, a beehive cannot survive without its Queen, the colony inevitably dies. A Queen produces 2000 eggs a day, and Patrick Mahomes produces easily 100 points a week. No one else can replace that kind of production.

So, if the Queen Bee goes down, it won’t matter if the worker bees AJ Green and Melvin Gordon are pollinating points for the Pies. There’s a reason Giorgio doesn’t have a backup QB in the hive at the moment. He knows that if something were to happen, he is staring at another year without the chance to take off his Beekeeping protective suit and put on a Brown Jacket. Heading into Week 5, the Queen Bee is alive and well, and so are Giorgio’s playoff chances. This just might be his year.