What do Joe Flacco and Snookie have in common?

I am not exactly comfortable admitting this, but I don't know which stung more, the Raven's relatively early exit from the playoffs or the fact that after last night the season of Jersey Shore is over. At least for the Ravens game I had about 29 beers to numb the pain, the bittersweet pill that was the Jersey Shore finale was one I had to swallow dry.

Its hard to be too upset about how the Ravens' season ended. They were one of the final eight teams remaining, they finished with double digit wins for the second straight year, Ray Rice emerged as one of the leagues most promising young stars and the defense seemed to congeal to some degree in the second half of the season. Of course, after last year's improbable run to the AFC championship, expectations coming into the season were sky high. Joe Flacco began the year looking like the second coming of Johnny U and ended it looking more like a gimpy Trent Dilfer 2.0, tasked merely with handing the ball off and managing the game. It is unclear that this in-season regression was due to nagging injuries, a lack of a competent receiving corps (and it looks like the Ravens will have a tough time upgrading this unit with free agent wide receivers unless the owners and the players can come together and put in place a new CBA) or a genuine sophomore slump. I would like to see Joe take more of a leadership role on the offense and behave less like a emotionless cybernetic organism fueled by Pizza Hut pizza.

Jersey Shore has become a cultural phenomenon not because of the controversy surrounding the Snookie punch, or the perceived ethnic stereotypes it portrayed. Its popularity was based upon the fact that Jersey Shore is a fucking great show. I defy any of its staunchest critics to sit and watch the season in its entirety and not grow to truly care about the characters. Sure, they are over-the-top and flamboyantly Italian, but these people are genuinely likable. We went from laughing at Snooki, to laughing with Sitch to genuinely caring about the future prospects of Ronnie and Sam's relationship.

I always thought that my dream was to be on the cast of the Real World (the amazing thing about the Shore is they got this much great material from barely more than a month in the shore house, while the Real Worlders are together for at least 6 months), but I would trade any "seven strangers" for a chance to chase poon in Seaside Heights with The Situation and Pauly D for a summer (I would put these two up as the best television dynamic duo since Bunk and McNulty and Vic and Shane and Jerry and George). Not since The Big Lebowski has there been a more quotable pop-culture commodity. From "beating the beat up" to "gorilla juiceheads" to "haterade is best served cold" there wasn't a 5-minute stretch that didn't feature an absolutely classic zinger or a knee-slappable one-liner.

Those of us that stayed up to tune into the Jersey Shore reunion show were treated to one of the more uncomfortable hours of television in recent memory. Everything started out predictably enough with Mike taking the stage to do his normal Situation shtick and take abuse from Vinnie and Ronnie. Soon he was joined by his wingman, Pauly and hilarity, of course, ensued. If you watched closely, however, you could tell things were going to get strange. Every time the camera stopped on Ronnie and Sammie, it was obvious that something just wasn't right there. They were sitting next to each other, but their body language suggested that they would rather not be. Sammie's facial expressions ranged from boredom to embarrassment to sheer rage. As soon as the two took the stage, the lightheartedness and fun that characterized the entire show was sucked out of the room faster than it took Snookie to pound 10 shots and strip down to her bra and leopard panties on the first night in the shore house. It was instantly replaced with an awkward bitterness, as Sammie sat in silence and Ronnie threw emotional haymakers. Eventually Sammie broke down, ran off the stage and locked herself in the bathroom to have a good cry with one of the show's producers. She composed herself, came back the stage and promptly broke things off with Ronnie (sending my girlfriend into a frenzied people.com search to find out if they had really broken up for good). From then on, the show was tense and you could tell the cast just wanted to get the hell out of there and get to their paid bar appearance. Not even the eternally peppy Snookie could raise the spirits of the room.

Much like the Ravens' season, Jersey Shore came in with a bang and went out with a whimper, but, boy, was the ride fun.