Why I Became Orthodox

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This is not an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. I know faithful, dedicated followers of that church who fervently believe in Jesus Christ, and I consider them friends. I love the people of the Roman Catholic Church. I still love so much of what it has accomplished, the proliferation of Christianity across the earth. I’m a diehard Notre Dame Fighting Irish football supporter, a lover of Friday fish fries, and I hope to one day lay my eyes upon the beauty of the Sistine Chapel. Every afternoon I walk my dog past the local Catholic church — a beautiful stone cathedral stretching what looks like a hundred feet into the air, with a clocktower that sings and chimes for the turn of every hour throughout the day, its the very cathedral my grandmother was baptized, married, and eulogized over the span of almost a century. I have no quarrel with that building or the people inside it. My quarrel is with the hierarchical structure of the church, with what I perceive to be serious problems in the development of the Papacy, and with a drive I couldn’t shake to acquire a fuller understanding of what I actually believed.

I’m just a layman. A man who decided to search for answers, and who, when presented with information that changed his views, felt obligated to act upon that new understanding and follow it through.

For a time I drifted. I didn’t know what to call myself — I never denied the existence of God — but I was somewhere in the neighborhood of agnostic, trying to grasp it for myself, to really know it in my heart rather than inherit it secondhand.

But I kept praying. I continued to pray the rosary, often daily, with stretches of latency creeping in. The belief in the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of the Virgin Mary, her miraculous ability as an intercessor — that was the weapon I carried through the wilderness.

For a few months in that period I attended an SSPX chapel. The Society of St. Pius X — the traditionalist Catholic group that rejects certain teachings and reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly on religious liberty and ecumenism, and celebrates exclusively the Traditional Latin Mass. I understood the appeal immediately. The reverence was there. The beauty was there. The sense that something ancient was being guarded rather than renovated. I did so because I felt the faith of my grandparents and my ancestors had been lost somewhere along the way, and I wasn’t sure what had replaced it.

But something felt off, and it took me a while to name it.

Here is the problem, and it is a genuinely brutal one for a Traditional Roman Catholic. If you believe the Pope is the visible head of the Church, the successor of Peter, endowed with universal and immediate jurisdiction, and — since Vatican I in 1870 — capable of teaching infallibly, then what exactly are you doing when you sit in a chapel where everyone around you is disappointed in him? Where the shared assumption is that Rome has gone wrong? You cannot be a good Catholic and hold the Pope in contempt. The structure doesn’t permit it. You are, functionally, in a state of protest against the very office that defines your ecclesiology. You are — and I don’t use this word lightly — flirting with heresy by the standards of your own church.

I sat in those pews and thought: this can’t hold. It’s only a matter of time before this is excommunicated.

And how, I kept asking, is that not antithetical to what Christ said? “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” If the Church is indefectible, what am I looking at?

It’s the main reason I stopped going. And then, this month, I watched what myself and others had long been expecting finally happen.

On July 1, 2026, at the seminary in Écône, Switzerland, the SSPX consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate, before roughly seventeen thousand of the faithful gathered from some seventy countries. The Vatican had warned them in May that this would constitute a schismatic act carrying automatic excommunication. On June 30, the eve of the ceremony, Pope Leo XIV published a final letter pleading with them — “Please turn back!” — and warning that to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity. The Society’s answer, delivered through its media office, was that they were changing absolutely nothing in their plans. They went ahead. The following day, Rome formally excommunicated the bishops, the priests, and some of the lay faithful.

It happened at Écône, on the same ground where Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without a mandate thirty-eight years before. The circle closed exactly where it opened.

I don’t write that with any satisfaction. I write it because I suspect there are men in those pews right now — men I knew — sitting with the same thoughts I was sitting with, and they are running out of room to avoid them. If you love the Latin Mass, if you love Tradition, if you believe the Church cannot err, and you now find yourself formally severed from the See of Peter for the crime of trying to preserve what you were given — then the question I had to ask is the question sitting in front of them. What if the fracture didn’t start in 1965? What if it didn’t start in 1870? What if it started a very long time ago, and you have been living in the aftermath your whole life without knowing the name of it?

Now, insofar as all of that deals with the administrative layers of the church, it wasn’t the only thing that moved me. As layer upon layer of evil has been uncovered in our world over the last two decades, crimes against children committed at scale, famine, genocide, I noticed a pattern. What’s happening looks like far more than man’s ordinary penchant for his own fleshly desires. It looks outright demonic.

And it is not new. When the Bolsheviks took Russia, the first thing they came for was the Church. Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the boy Alexei — were shot and bayoneted in a cellar in Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16 and 17, 1918, along with their doctor and three of their servants. Their bodies were carted into the forest, mutilated with acid and grenades so they could not be identified, and buried in the dirt. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad glorified them as martyrs in 1981. The Moscow Patriarchate glorified them in 2000 as passion-bearers — a category the Church reserves for those who are killed by persecutors and who meet that death in the manner of Christ, in humility and without hatred, forgiving their murderers, even where the killers’ stated motive was political rather than religious. It is the title given to Saints Boris and Gleb.

But the family was only the beginning. Within five years of the revolution, twenty-eight Orthodox bishops and some twelve hundred priests had been executed. Over the following decades the numbers become almost impossible to hold in the mind: tens of thousands of clergy arrested, the great majority of them shot or worked to death in the camps. Between 1927 and 1949 the number of functioning Orthodox churches in Russia fell from roughly twenty-nine thousand to fewer than five hundred. The seminaries were shuttered, the monasteries emptied, the icons burned or sold abroad for hard currency, and what survived of the faith survived underground, in kitchens and cellars and forests, passed hand to hand by people who understood exactly what it would cost them if they were caught.

That was not an economic program with unfortunate religious side effects. That was a direct assault on Christianity, executed with method and enthusiasm, and it is the single largest persecution of Christians in the history of the world.

And none of it was new. The Church has a name for the men and women the Soviets killed: the New Martyrs. Sit with that word for a second, because it is a claim and not a decoration. New is only intelligible if there are old ones.

For nearly three hundred years Rome did to the Church what Moscow would do to it later. And Rome did not especially care what Christians believed in their hearts — Rome cared that they would not perform. The public sacrifice was simply what it meant to be a loyal subject, and the Christians would not do it. That refusal is what the Empire could not tolerate. Nero began it around the year 64, when he needed someone to blame for the fire and found a small strange sect ready to hand. He had them torn apart by dogs, crucified, coated in pitch and set alight in his gardens to light the paths at night.

Then in 250 the Emperor Decius ordered every citizen in the Empire to sacrifice to the gods, and sent commissions traveling through the cities and villages to supervise it and to issue a written certificate to every person who complied. A libellus. A piece of paper proving you had done what the state demanded, so that you might be permitted to go on existing. Some fled. Some bought the paper without performing the sacrifice. Some refused, and were arrested, and tortured, and killed.

It peaked under Diocletian, who issued his first edict on February 24 in the year 303 and timed it deliberately to fall on the feast of Terminus, the god of boundaries. The scriptures were burned. The churches were pulled down. Men, women and children were beheaded and thrown to the beasts for refusing to renounce Christ. The Christians called that era the Age of Martyrs.

And within a decade of that edict, the Empire was Christian.

It did not work in Rome and it did not work in Russia. The persecution never thins the Church. It feeds it. So when I say what I am watching in our own time looks demonic, I am not reaching for a metaphor. I am saying I recognize it. Nero and Lenin are separated by nineteen centuries and every conceivable difference of language and pretext, and they wanted precisely the same thing, and they were each of them beaten by an unarmed people.

These are attacks on God’s natural order, and they are aimed with precision at the things most necessary to upholding it: the Church, the family, the schools, the community, the nation, and those least able to defend themselves — children, the broken, and the apathetically asleep. These served as a foundation of which I began to build out my understanding, and this is what I arrived at: Jesus Christ is the Lord of Spirits.

My brief but impactful study of demonic possession is what made that crystal clear to me. Read the Gospels with an eye for it and it is impossible to miss how much of Christ’s public ministry consists of casting out demons, and how the demons behave when He arrives. They recognize Him before anyone else does. They know exactly who He is while the crowds are still arguing about it. They cry out that He is the Son of God, they beg not to be tormented, they ask where they are permitted to go — and they go where He sends them. They do not debate Him. They do not resist Him. There is no contest. And when He gives His disciples authority to do the same, it is explicitly delegated authority, exercised in His name.

That asymmetry is significant. There is no dualism here, no two equal powers grinding against each other in the dark. There is a Lord, and there are creatures in rebellion against Him who cannot stand in His presence and know it. He is the Son of God. He is what they most despise and relentlessly seek to subvert. The nations that hold His followers are currently under siege by several means at once, and what we are watching is spiritual warfare playing out in front of us — only part of which our limited sensory perception permits us to see.

And there is a hell. We have all lived our own private versions of it at one time or another. It is not merely the presence of evil; it is the absence of God. God is the umbrella from the storm. He doesn’t command us to abstain from sin and wickedness to torment us, He does so because to do so opens us up to spiritual harassment. When you have seen the abyss of darkness laid bare, you understand that you must find your way to the light, and that it is a choice each of us is confronted with.

So that is the first pillar. Christ is Lord.

Which left me with one remaining question — the hard one. Where is His Church?

I was convinced of one thing: there is One True Church. Christ did not say churches. He said “upon this rock I will build My church,” singular, and He promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. When He gave His disciples instructions for resolving a dispute among the brethren, the final court of appeal He named was not a text and not a man — He told them to take it to the church, and if a man will not hear the church, let him be as a heathen. That only means something if the church is a visible, identifiable body with the authority to be heard. He prayed on the night He was betrayed that His followers would be one, as He and the Father are one. And when Paul went looking for a metaphor, he did not reach for a federation or a marketplace. He called it a body. You do not have five bodies. You have one, or you have dismemberment.

And to my understanding at the time, it could only be the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church. Both have apostolic succession. Both trace to Pentecost. Both survived the pre-New Testament years, the Roman persecutions, and the heresies of the first few centuries — many of which have simply been repackaged for a modern audience under different branding.

In that state of flux, I kept returning to the same instinct: But it must be Rome, right? The East broke away. They committed an apostasy in rejecting Rome, and they must simply acquiesce and come home.

That was my thinking. Then I talked to a friend who is downright rabid in his study of this question, he made several compelling arguments, and I began to look into the possibility that there was something more to Orthodoxy after all.

Something exists now that did not exist for most of Church history, and it has evangelized thousands of Orthodox Christians: the internet. Video platforms — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok — they can rot your brain, but they can also deliver simple, direct, plainly stated arguments, and there are many individuals on those applications who do so for the faith. Formal debates between scholars of both churches, available to any layman willing to sit and watch and think. Explanations from men vastly more theologically literate than I could hope to be, many of them converts themselves, who had walked the road ahead of me and left markers.

And then it led me to one book that sealed it: The Orthodox Church, by Kallistos Ware. It is an entry-level explanation for inquirers and catechumens. After months of deep dives and videos and debates and articles, it took roughly fifty pages of that text to finish the job.

Here is what I found, and here is why it changed me.

For the first millennium, the Church governed itself through councils — not through a single man. When a controversy threatened the faith, the bishops of the whole Church assembled, guided by the Holy Spirit, they argued, prayed, and decided together. Seven of these are recognized as Ecumenical: Nicaea I in 325, Constantinople I in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680 and 681, and Nicaea II in 787.

Presiding over the ancient Church were five great patriarchal sees, what came to be called the Pentarchy: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Rome held pride of place. Rome was primus inter pares — first among equals.

Sit with that phrase, because everything turns on it.

First — yes. Genuinely first. Rome held a primacy of honor that the East never denied and that Orthodoxy does not deny to this day.

Among equals — also yes. First among them. Not above them. Not over them. Not possessing them. A primacy of honor is not a supremacy of power, and the difference between those two things is the difference between two churches.

The disputed ground is Christ’s word to Peter in Matthew 16:18 — “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Rome came to read that as a grant of universal, immediate jurisdiction over the whole Church. The East read it as a primacy of honor and of witness, held by the see of Peter but not conferring the right to rule the other patriarchates or to define the faith alone.

For a thousand years, Rome did not act alone. Rome made no unilateral changes to the faith of the Church. It moved in concert with the council and the other four sees. That was not a courtesy. That was the constitution of the Church.

And then it stopped being true.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed — the one hammered out at Nicaea in 325 and completed at Constantinople in 381, the one recited every Sunday by Catholics and Orthodox alike, and by a great many Protestants besides — says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.

In the West, a word was added. Filioque. And the Son.

Now here is the detail that mattered most to me, because it demolished the story I had been telling myself. Rome did not invent it, and for a long time Rome resisted it. The addition arose regionally — in Spain, then among the Franks — and worked its way inward. Popes fought it. Leo III went so far as to have the original creed, without the addition, inscribed on silver plates and set up at St. Peter’s, precisely so that no one would tamper with it. Rome held the line for generations before finally yielding.

Which means the East was not innovating by rejecting the Filioque. The East was conserving. And Rome, in the end, accepted an alteration to an ecumenical creed — a creed produced by the whole Church in council — without the whole Church in council.

That is not a footnote. That is the thing itself.

By the middle of the eleventh century, the two halves of the Church had been drifting apart for a long time — different languages, different liturgical customs, a widening disagreement over what Rome’s primacy actually entitled Rome to do, and the Filioque sitting unresolved between them. In 1054, Pope Leo IX — the Bishop of Rome, the Patriarch of the West, one of the five — sent a delegation east to settle matters with Constantinople. A legate is an ambassador, a man dispatched to speak with the authority of the one who sent him. The man Leo sent was Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida.

Humbert arrived in Constantinople as papal legate with two companions and a temper. His counterpart was Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople — the senior bishop of the East, and a man every bit as immovable as Humbert. Negotiations between them collapsed. Neither man was built for concession. Humbert waited. Then he acted.

On Saturday, July 16, 1054, as the Divine Liturgy was beginning, Humbert strode into Hagia Sophia, walked to the high altar, and laid upon it a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch and those who support his folly. He turned and walked out. At the threshold he stopped, shook the dust of that cathedral from his feet, and shouted: Videat Deus et judicet. May God see and judge.

And a deacon ran out into the road after him.

He ran out into the street in great distress and begged the Cardinal to take the bull back. To undo it. Humbert refused. The document was dropped in the street.

That deacon understood — instantly, viscerally, in a way it took the rest of Christendom centuries to catch up to — that something enormous and irreversible had just happened, and he ran into the road to try to stop it with his hands. Four days later, Cerularius convened a synod of his own bishops and excommunicated Humbert and his companions in return.

There is one more thing, and it is also worth noting. Pope Leo IX, who had sent Humbert, was already dead. He had died that April, months before. Humbert acted on the authority of a man in his grave, and some historians have argued the excommunication was therefore invalid on its face — the legates’ mandate died with the pope who issued it.

The most famous rupture in the history of the Church may have been executed without valid authority, by a man badly overmatched by his own certainty, in a foreign cathedral, in front of a deacon who begged him to stop.

I should say plainly: no serious historian now claims the schism began that day. The break was a long estrangement, not a clean snap. Communion continued in various places for decades afterward; the East and West were still cooperating at the launch of the First Crusade in 1095. The cracks had been forming for centuries, and they would take centuries more to fully open.

But that is my point, not an objection to it.

That was the unlock. The changes in the Roman Catholic Church didn’t go back to Vatican II. It didn’t go back to Vatican I. It went back to 1054, and the cracks had appeared long before that. Rome, which for over a thousand years had never altered the faith unilaterally — always in concert with the council and the other four sees — had separated itself. And having separated itself, it would go on granting more and more authority to its Pope, and that accumulating authority would produce fundamental changes to the faith.

Here is what I did not expect to find, and what I have come to see as a mercy rather than a defect. The Orthodox Church has not made those changes — and it does not possess a mechanism for making them.

To be precise, because this matters: the Orthodox Church holds councils. It has held them throughout its history and holds them still. What it cannot do is convene an Ecumenical Council, because an Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox understanding requires the whole Church — the full body, all the ancient sees in communion — and its authority is not merely declared from above but received by the whole body of the faithful. With Rome out of communion, that fullness does not exist. The Church cannot assemble in its entirety, and so no council of that authority can be convened.

For a thousand years, this has held the Orthodox Church in place. It has prevented the sweeping reforms and redefinitions of the modern era. It has meant, for better and worse, that Orthodoxy has been unable to renovate itself.

But that inability is precisely what has protected it. The Church has not been able to be dragged along by the changing times, because there is no lever with which to drag it.

And this is the point I want to land on cleanly, because it’s the whole thing. No see in the East can do what Rome did. Not Constantinople. Not Moscow. Not Antioch, not Alexandria, not Jerusalem. There is no throne in Orthodoxy from which one man may alter the faith of the whole Church by his own authority. That power does not exist there. It was never claimed, never granted, never assumed.

That, finally, is what I could not stop thinking about.

Once the lightbulb went on, I went deeper — into the beliefs, the practices, the literature. What began as an intellectual conviction that this was the right one became something else. The writings of Orthodox priests and monks range from dense theology to what amounts to a survival guides for a Christian trying to navigate the modern world, and both halves of that spoke to me. It captured me intellectually, spiritually, and eventually through experience.

I kept reading about the Church for months before I could muster the courage to get myself to walk into one.

The first Liturgy, I nearly didn’t go. The doubts swirled: You’ll be rejected. You’re not good enough to even enter the building. You’re not ready.

After putting it off time and time again, I finally went.

Now to offer a bit of brevity: Billy Crystal talks about the first time he walked into Yankee Stadium — after years of listening to games on the radio and watching them on a black-and-white television — and seeing the green of the grass, the pinstripes, the crowd, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and being knocked flat by it. That, in a secular register, is close to what I felt walking into the parish. The colors of the icons. The imagery. The incense. I could see the roots of much of what I had missed about the Catholic Church there, waiting — but without the inner turmoil I had carried before. That is a problem a great many Roman Catholics are still carrying today. When I finally attended my first Divine Liturgy, I felt like I had come home.

Every piece of information, every belief, every experience of revelation across my life has been an accumulating step that got me here. I have seen the modernist waves, and the spiritualists, I have seen those running on vibes. I have seen them attempt to reduce Jesus Christ to merely being a higher level of consciousness. None of it felt authentic. None of it could carry the true weight of the full faith.

And even at the end of it — after all the books read, the videos watched, the documentaries studied, the catechism classes attended — I did not feel worthy to be part of it. I’m not sure that feeling is supposed to, or ever will, go away.

There was a euphoria and a relief when I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church. And then there is the rest of it: the lifelong commission of carrying your Cross, of bearing your burdens, of struggling against your passions. It is the long, slow labor of a man working against his lesser instincts to unite his heart and his mind and his soul with Christ. That is what I know I must do.

To keep pressing on even when I falter — striving to improve, to atone, and to attain.

The race is never finished until you are.

Is the Swamp Draining or Leaking?

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“U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham … died at age 71 from a heart ailment, specifically an aortic dissection caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”

— Reuters

Another long-time establishment Republican will no longer be a member of the U.S. Senate, joining a list that includes several not seeking reelection this fall—Mitch McConnell (KY), Thom Tillis (NC), Joni Ernst (IA), Cynthia Lummis (WY)—as well as primary loser John Cornyn (TX), and now Lindsey Graham (SC).

I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

Dead Sox Come To Life

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The Red Sox just swept the Mets to head into the All-Star break on a nine-game winning streak. Having won 13 of their last 15 games, they now sit just a half-game back of the final American League Wild Card spot.

I covered the additional Wild Card spot changing the calculus for which teams are buyers and sellers at the deadline, and the fact that the Red Sox may win themselves into a potentially worse situation by holding onto assets, in my Dead Tradeline column last week:

While they have found some momentum lately, including a recent sweep of the Yankees, they have no business considering themselves buyers at this deadline. But the slim possibility of a returning Crochet and Anthony, along with Craig Breslow’s desperation to save his general manager job, could have them thinking twice at the deadline three weeks from now.

The Red Sox need to sell, starting with Sonny Gray, Aroldis Chapman, and Jarren Duran. Restocking the cupboard that has borne less fruit than expected with the triumvirate of Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, and Kristian Campbell—from varying degrees of disappointment to disaster—should be the priority. The faltering young core has them much further away from a championship window than it appeared just four months ago.

While I commend the team for overcoming significant adversity and elevating their level of play, not acquiring future assets to build around an already struggling young core could cost the team over the next five years. But hey, if they win a World Series, it would be worth it.

Now, you could consider this the ultimate Red Sox fan reaction: being upset even while they ride a nine-game winning streak and sweep both New York franchises in consecutive weeks. The issue is that Boston has such deep institutional and developmental flaws that nothing short of Craig Breslow getting fired—and, ideally, Fenway Sports Group selling the team—can fix them.

Their current odds to win it all, even sitting just a half-game back, are 35/1 on FanDuel. Breslow may see a path to short-term success that saves his job, but it could end up costing the Red Sox a brighter future.

The Mac is Back

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The first fight in years that had me feeling butterflies before the action started has ended abruptly after Conor McGregor appears to have torn his ACL almost immediately upon the start of the fight.

“The most anticipated comeback in years lasted just 69 seconds before a devastating knee injury brought it to an abrupt end.”

– Reuters

While I expected Conor McGregor to have limited success early before ultimately getting outclassed by Max Holloway for as long as he could stay on his feet through the remaining rounds, my concern pre-fight was for Conor the human being—not Conor the box-office draw. In the past year he has gotten married, seems to have kicked what many (allegedly) interpreted as a persistent drug habit, and has been the most clear-headed and present we have seen him since before the Mayweather bout.

He had two remaining fights on his UFC contract before becoming a free agent. After that, he’ll have $100 million paydays waiting for him against the likes of Jake Paul, Floyd Mayweather, or whichever celebrity or retired boxer Netflix or Saudi Arabia’s PIF decides to throw enough money at him to face.

TKO, the parent company of the UFC and WWE, has recently drawn criticism after awarding massive compensation packages to CEO Ari Emanuel and President Mark Shapiro while reportedly asking some WWE talent to accept pay cuts. I don’t like the way they do business, and I hope they eventually sell TKO to an owner who treats both the talent and the fans better.

That being said, it’s why I’m happy Conor McGregor fulfilled another obligation, collected an estimated $30 million payday, and is now looking at just one final Octagon appearance before his indentured servitude to TKO is complete.

The Self-Immolation of Christopher Nolan

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When the Academy rolled out its Representation and Inclusion Standards in 2020, it assured us Hollywood would be making more films like this. That wasn’t surprising. I believe that is also the reason 1917 wasn’t given its obvious Best Picture win in 2019. It simply didn’t rise to the level of “inclusive” Hollywood now required, even though it hadn’t been made official.

“Director Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey… has already prompted a torrent of division and negative backlash for its casting, which some have framed as a modern affront to a foundational text of Western literature.”

— Christian Post

What is somewhat surprising is Christopher Nolan’s willingness to go along with it to such extremes. He seems to have gone in with reckless abandon, and he is going to learn just how much our shared reality has shifted as the rejection of this film grows louder. Sure, it will sell some tickets to the normies. It may even turn a profit. But it is an absolute PR disaster for the Christopher Nolan brand. At the time of writing, the trailer is estimated to have accumulated roughly 700,000 dislikes on YouTube.

The backlash is so fervent because people felt that Nolan was still a filmmaker first. That he hadn’t dug into this level of modernist deconstruction at any time before. I had my doubts when the film was announced, the color palette itself felt off, earthy and brutalist in a way that signaled a “reimagining for a new and diverse audience.”

This was filmed in 2025, well past the point when mainstream audiences would accept such a subversive interpretation of a classic. This isn’t a timing issue. It’s either the director’s indifference to his former broad spectrum appeal, a gross miscalculation or a humiliation ritual.

Hockey, Now I Understand

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DISCLAIMER: There will be talk of being a fan of multiple different teams in this post, and not even just the team of the location you were born. I know this can be extremely triggering for many sports fans, and to be clear, I hear you. But that’s not what this is about, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

I want to be upfront about what this is. This isn’t a “The Canadians were right all along, hockey is secretly great, let me convert you” article, and it’s not a highlight reel of a good playoff run. It’s the story of a guy who grew up a complete outsider to the sport, and ended up twenty years later catching a full-blown case of hockey fever. There’s a lot of ground to cover, some of it’s embarrassing, some of it involves my short attention span and sports media rights, and it ends somewhere I did not see coming.

Unlike the other major American sports leagues, hockey is the only one I didn’t play at any point in my life. Naturally I played baseball, basketball and football for several years, and though it was only for two brief seasons, I did play soccer as a kid. And while I prefer the term football for what happens at the highest level of club competition in Europe and the World Cup, I most certainly did not play that kind of football, I played soccer. One season with a schoolmate whose parents owned a Mexican restaurant and sponsored the team, he and his brother on the team were so talented they were even getting me the ball in front of the net and I was scoring. It was incredible. The next year I played for a Mormon coach who stuck me on the back line and I’m not sure we even won a game. That was the end of my soccer career.

But hockey? I never played a second of it, never saw an ice rink. Nobody from my hometown circle did either, hockey just wasn’t a big thing in the agricultural heartland of Central California. I was even under the impression I was too big for hockey. Then I saw the Sharks’ 7th round draft pick this year, Alexander Karmanov, a 7-foot-1 defenseman out of Chisinau, Moldova — the tallest player ever drafted in NHL history. Brock Lesnar has two sons, and they both play hockey, I’m sure they would dwarf me on the ice as well. But this article tells the story of how it all finally fell into place.

My first exposure to hockey came in high school, a buddy of mine and his family were diehard Sharks fans. These were the Sharks teams of my formative fandom years, hell on ice, at least in the regular season. I even had nicknames for a lot of the guys — Jonathan Cheechoo “Train,” Joe “every rose has its” Thornton, Pattie “melt” Marleau, Brent Burns with his toothless grin was “Gummy Bear,” Fred Vlasic was The Pickler, and Danny Boyle was “Boil on Your Ass” — every hit he threw or slapshot he ripped got a “you got a Boyle on your ass!” out of me directed toward the opposing team. The pace of play was exciting, but I was missing the action half the time and stuck enjoying the replays. I wasn’t fully getting it. Then there were the painful playoff eliminations — from 2004 to 2010, a great season ended in a humiliating playoff exit, year after year after year.

Amazingly, those years of Sharks playoff disappointment were interrupted when I moved outside Raleigh in 2005 and attended my first live NHL game. It kicked things up to a level I hadn’t fathomed. Entering the arena and feeling that 50 degree air being pumped down onto you, wading through the turnstiles with thousands of people adorned in hockey jerseys, walking through the tunnel of your section down into the lower bowl and seeing it all laid out before you, the sheet of ice, the plexiglass, the big scoreboard video screen hanging from the ceiling. That all hits you in a way that a television broadcast simply can’t translate effectively. Which would become one of my biggest gripes about hockey for years. Suffice to say, that all of that in-person experience occurred before the puck even dropped, then the sights and sounds of the game became all consuming. The skates filleting the ice, the crisp sound of the puck being passed around and the satisfying click when the blade catches it, the crash of the boards, and the gasp when a slapshot zings off the crossbar and a metallic ping radiates throughout the arena. It’s three periods of pure adrenaline, a great live event, it was a fun place to down a few beers and get caught up in the fervor. And those Carolina Hurricanes I saw for my first live hockey game? They turn out to be very important for how this whole thing comes together.

The 2005-2006 Hurricanes came to me right after the missed season of 04-05 that saw a prolonged labor dispute cost the league a full season, and usher in a salary cap that had unintended consequences on the attempt for parity in the league.

These Canes had serious talent. A 21 year old Eric Staal, Captain Rod Brind’Amour, Cam Ward at goalie (not the Titans QB). They were a fun team to watch, I loved seeing hockey in person and I was fast becoming a believer in it being the best live sports experience, but I didn’t feel it translated to television in a way that would sustain me as a viewer. The Canes went on to win the Stanley Cup that year, beating the Oilers in seven games.

The 2010’s started off hot with the Winter Olympics. I watched the Gold Medal game in a bar with friends in California and seeing Sid the Kid and Canada defeat the US was rough. Throughout the first half of the decade I saw a handful of games when the Sharks would play in Denver against the Av’s, including a shootout win for San Jose where I sat five rows up from the goal behind the glass, probably the best live hockey experience I’ve had.

In 2016 I was back visiting my old friends in California who had been the Sharks fans that first showed me the sport in my high school days. The Sharks were in the Stanley Cup finals, finally, after years of regular season success and postseason heartbreak, they were at the doorstep of immortality, their names just a few games away from being forever engraved upon Lord Stanley’s cup, and they lost. Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the Sharks 4 games to 2. Sidney Crosby had ripped another championship away from a team I was backing, on his way to winning the Conn Smythe trophy as the MVP of the playoffs.

Okay, I get it, shit happens. You don’t always win. But this was more than that, I wasn’t even closely following the sport at this point. I had just been back in an environment where the playoffs were a focal point of the people I was visiting, but I didn’t have cable, I didn’t have the NHL out-of-market package, I followed the NFL and College Football vehemently but in order to watch them I’d have to go to a buddy’s house or a sports bar, neither of which I was opposed to at the time, in fact I greatly favored the latter. The issue was, there was this sport that I didn’t fully comprehend, that was incredibly exciting to see in person, that was difficult to find and watch on television, and even when I did so, it wasn’t really that enjoyable for me.

So in 2017 I took a trip to Boston, I saw two Bruins games at the TD Garden. The first against the San Jose Sharks, and the second against the Los Angeles Kings, that Sunday we went to see the Patriots and the Chargers play, Tom Brady got the win, it was famously Jimmy Garoppolo’s last game as a Patriot before being traded to San Francisco. It was the second annual “Ultimate Sports Weekend,” a trip me and my friends coined to describe having a weekend rendezvous somewhere in America based on sports events. The first annual Ultimate Sports Weekend featured a trip to LA for UFC 199, the best live sports event I’ve attended, followed by a trip up the coast for a Red Sox-Giants game that was the David Ortiz farewell tour and a walk-off win for the Red Sox thanks to Xander Bogaerts. That’s another story for another time.

What this Bruins bang-bang (a term I use, coined by Louis CK, to describe doing the same thing twice in a row — in his case its original meaning refers to eating a meal out at a restaurant and immediately following it up by eating another meal at a different restaurant) did was convince me I needed to become a true hockey fan, and I was going to smash my head against the wall doing so until it happened. I went back to Colorado where I was living and signed up for the NHL.TV package. I was going to come home and watch the Bruins every night they were on, usually at 5 o’clock Mountain Time, and it was going to be the greatest thing ever. I quickly learned that NHL.TV is not the hockey equivalent of MLB.TV. MLB.TV had its issues, of course you couldn’t watch Sunday Night Baseball that ESPN had the rights to, but you could see the vast majority of your team’s games, provided you lived in another market. And with the only in-market team blacked out being the Rockies for me at that time, it was an incredible amount of content for a very reasonable price, plus I used a school email to get a 35% student discount for about a decade. My first season with NHL.TV was my last. The Bruins were a great squad — Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Tuukka Rask between the pipes, Zdeno Chara’s hulking 6’9″ frame on the blue line, and up-and-comers David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy rounded out a Cup contender squad.

Everything was set up for me to enjoy the ride of Bruins hockey, from an incredible arena I had just spent two evenings in to their world class roster. Then the issues began, because the Bruins were a top team, an inordinate amount of their games were on cable, meaning not available to me on NHL.TV. Also NHL Network would show a few games a week of different teams, and I thought sure, of course, MLB Network does this as well. But what MLB doesn’t do is black out the MLB Network games for their MLB.TV subscribers. The NHL did this. Every NHL Network game the Bruins played was unavailable to me. Every cable game was off the table as well. If they had games on NBC, I wasn’t getting those either, no rabbit ears would work for me on the side of a mountain where I lived. The games they played against top competition were nearly all blacked out, because they were the most coveted by networks. I swore off NHL.TV and would never buy it again. I would however still follow the Bruins — watching their highlights the next day on YouTube, checking them out in bars or restaurants when it fell into place — but the accessibility issue was wide enough that the passion for following the team was gone. And more than I liked hockey, I liked that team.

The summer of 2019 rolls around and I have a modest futures bet on the Bruins I placed at MGM Grand in person in Las Vegas. The Bruins end up in the Stanley Cup finals, my parents are planning a trip to Vegas the week after the finals. I have this plan in my head of handing them the futures ticket and them cashing it in. “Wow, our son the genius predicted the future and he made some money at it.” Well, I didn’t really expect them to do that. The Bruins went down 3 games to 2 in the series after losing a tight game 5 by a score of 2-1. They had clawed their way back and forced a game 7 in Boston, this was it, the cards had fallen into place perfectly, and then the Bruins lost game 7.

With that bitter taste in my mouth, the next year was the Covid season, the playoffs happen in a bubble, the following year after that the NHL fully bends over for Canadian politics and enforces the strongest vaccine mandate of any sports league in North America, 100% gotta have it. I check out of hockey entirely, and in doing so miss what is now one of my favorite players, Nikita Kucherov, win consecutive Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021. 2022 I see the Av’s win it and tip my cap, having been to several Av’s home games in person, but never as an Av’s fan, I was still pleased for them. 2023 is where I begin to increase my disinterest into peak levels — the Boston Bruins are back with a vengeance, they put up 135 points in the regular season, a then NHL record, and run away with the Presidents’ Trophy, the best record in the regular season. They take a commanding 3-1 series lead in the opening round against the Florida Panthers. The Panthers came back and won in 7 games, knocking the Bruins out — the best regular season in league history was meaningless. This was worse than any fumble the Sharks ever had. And to be clear, I wasn’t watching these games. I had no way to at the time, I was a fan who wasn’t willing to pay a hundred bucks a month for cable outside the NFL/College Football season, that also included the MLB postseason. My thoughts on hockey became, “This is stupid, the best teams don’t even win, it’s all about luck, this sport doesn’t even make sense, you can’t even see the puck go into the net half the time when someone does score.”

I not only didn’t watch another hockey game for three years after this, I didn’t even follow the sport, save for one Buffalo Sabres game I attended in person after relocating to their area, which was great live, but I wasn’t going to pay thirty bucks a month for MSG+ to watch the Sabres play — it just wasn’t going to happen.

2026, Team USA wins the Gold Medal at the Winter Olympics. I miss watching it live, but see the replay — 16 years after the heartbreak against Canada, we finally got it done. I was extremely proud, and as a lapsed hockey fan it piques a little interest. I hear a few names on the team and log them into memory, but I don’t try to watch any hockey. Then the Buffalo Sabres make the playoffs, first time in 14 years, and it’s the talk of Western New York. Tage Thompson, Team USA gold medalist, Arizona native — meaning much like me in Central California, he grew up in 110-degree-plus temperatures for much of the year — currently lives in Western New York. The parallels to me were significant.

The Sabres knock out the Bruins in the first round. Pastrnak is still in Boston, but the team is a shell of its 2023 self. The Sabres make it to game 7 of the second round against Montreal — the Montreal Canadiens, the greatest heel team in sports to me outside the New York Yankees. 24 Stanley Cups, from Quebec, the French spelling of the name, the 21,000-seat arena with the fans singing “olé” chants — I can’t stand them, but I absolutely respect them. And I think they’re great for hockey, rivalries matter, and they’re an excellent one for Buffalo and Boston to have.

Through this point of the playoffs, I’m still just reading newspaper clippings and catching social media highlights, but we are arriving at the perfect storm that drew me back into hockey — this time in a way that didn’t just make me a casual fan again, it “unlocked” the sport for me.

This may sound like a paid advertisement, it’s not — if a certain Alphabet Corporation wanted it to be, they can send me a number, as long as it’s not zero I’ll probably say yes. YouTube TV launches their long-awaited skinny sports bundle. Introductory price of 55 bucks a month, jumping to 65 a month after one year, to include ESPN Unlimited content integration (that means out of market NHL games) by the fall. It has essentially everything you need to be an American sports fan for the big four leagues and college football. (Yes, I hear you, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Netflix, Paramount Plus, and their exclusive games and rights fragmentation. I get it, I get it, I really do. But as of right now it’s a great value for a hockey fan.) All the TV networks, the ESPN suite, Fox and NBC Sports channels. In the back of my mind I decide I’ll subscribe when the World Cup rolls around, and just carry it through football season and probably from then on.

For the first time in decades, it felt like sports fans were made a somewhat reasonable offer — presenting them an enormous slate of live sports content in a central app for a single acceptable price.

On X, I start seeing posts about the Carolina Hurricanes from a rambunctious contingent of fans who are referring to themselves and their club as the “Canefederacy.” They’re posting Civil War memes, replacing the stars and bars with the hurricane warning flag, or at times including the stars and bars and incorporating the hurricane warning flag. This hurricane warning flag logo is an alternate logo that they did not have back when I was seeing them in Raleigh twenty years before — a hockey stick standing up on its end, with two red flags waving from it with black squares in the middle, instantly appears to me to be one of the best logos in sports.

And who would these Hurricanes happen to be meeting in the Eastern Conference Finals — the big bad Canadiens. I watch the game one highlights on YouTube the next day, Canes lose, but they can definitely beat these guys. I watch game two highlights, Nikolaj Ehlers hits a spinning goal in OT and scores the game winner. Series tied 1-1, I gotta be a part of this, I signed up for the YouTube TV offer, and I watched game three, my first time watching a hockey game on television in over three years. Canadiens legend Claude Lemieux comes out with the torch before the game (his last ever public appearance), the Bell Centre is going crazy, it’s quite a sight to see. That’s when I see what the Canes are all about, that’s when I understand the internet memes I’ve been seeing on my timeline — the Canes play a chaotically aggressive style of hockey that I can’t ever remember seeing played at this level before. The speed and intensity of how they constantly harassed Montreal hooked me, I couldn’t watch this style of hockey passively like I used to do. I needed to lock in, everything happening on the ice mattered. This was where I learned the frequency of being a hockey spectator.

Each sport has its own cadence, its own wavelength — you must attune your mind to each to fully engage with it and get the most out of the experience. Over time I have wired my brain differently for different sports. American football is great for our modern attention spans — I can watch a play, then daydream, check my phone, look at the dog, run to the fridge, whatever the hell it is, and have about 30 seconds before the next play, and the announcers and the crowd let you know as you get near to the next snap. Easy to watch. People talk about the fact that there’s only 15 minutes of actual action in football, and I hate this phrase, and I solemnly swear not to use it again, but it’s a feature not a bug. Baseball has its own cadence, and many can’t dial themselves into it — baseball allows you time to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts, be it like a manager working through the changing scenarios and bullpen options and defensive shifts and matchups, or watching the crowd, listening to the announcers, or just letting yourself drift momentarily until the next pitch or contact is offered up. Soccer/world football was one that required patience and time for me, and it’s the most controversial one I can speak of in the United States. But with that equanimity and some level of personal interest, it can be appreciated for what it is, and it rewards that patience with some of the highest skills and achievements of athleticism and mastery of any sport today. Hockey was the most elusive — I couldn’t apply any of the ways I watched other sports to hockey, you can’t watch it passively, you can’t pause or check your phone or look away every sixty seconds. The 2026 Canes taught me this: lock in. Give the sport 45 minutes of attention, that’s about how long each period will last in real time. You’ll get an 18-minute break after to do what you need to do, you’ll get 3 commercial breaks a period as well, roughly at the 14, 10, and 6-minute-remaining marks. You can come up for air then, but by staying focused, watching the pressure and shape, letting the game play out, following the flow of the action — the line changes, the dump and chase, the zone resets — you see the game not as an attempt to find the tiny puck on the ice, you see the 10 men on the ice almost as a living organism, watching its mutations, ebbs and flows, then at the drop of a hat a couple quick passes are made in the offensive zone that open up a sliver of daylight, a shot rings out and hits the back of the net, the goal horn blares and you feel either a sigh of relief and glory, or disappointment. This newfound cadence of watching hockey, of finally cracking the frequency, along with having a team I truly enjoyed watching play, gave me the sport in a way that many others had understood that I had just never fully appreciated.

And these 2026 Canes tied me back to those games twenty years ago at the RBC Center. Eric Staal, the riveting young offensive player that led them to the cup in 2006 whose younger brother Jordan Staal, now 37, captains the current team. He plays a different style than Eric, but is an incredible watch. He scored one of the greatest goals I have ever seen, live or in a highlight package — falling down facing away from the goal, the puck bouncing near his left side, he desperately swung his stick with his left hand and caught just enough of it to lift it up and over a leaping goalie and into the net. A one-in-a-million shot that is only possible when every part of your being is determined to do all you can to succeed.

Rod Brind’Amour, the captain of the ’06 Canes squad, is now the head coach — in his 8th year coaching Carolina he has suffered several heartbreaking playoff defeats. But this team was not carrying any hangover from their previous outings, they added a critical offensive piece in winger Nikolaj Ehlers from Winnipeg in the offseason that unlocked a newfound offensive success that the pace-of-play kings had been missing. Rod the Bod, as he is affectionately and accurately called, became one of my favorite coaches in sports after seeing the way he treats his team and gets them to play a level of ego-less hockey that I don’t know that I have seen played night in and night out across any sport.

The Canes knocked off the Canadiens in 5 games, then rolled into the Finals against a star-studded Vegas Golden Knights team. The Canes went down 2 games to 1 in the series, but clawed all the way back, rattling off three straight victories and bringing the cup home to Raleigh exactly 20 years after that magical 2006 season.

And wouldn’t you know that ESPN Unlimited inside the YouTube TV sports bundle means I’ll be able to watch these Canes all season long next year. And that’s not it — those Sharks, who could never reach the promised land, recently landed the best young player in the league in Macklin Celebrini, and have literally won the lottery multiple times over, the draft lottery, including several top-4 picks including at 1st overall (Celebrini) and 2nd overall (twice), including the 2nd overall pick this year. And I watched the first round of the NHL draft. Yes, really. For the first time in my life. And I was thrilled when the San Jose Sharks drafted Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg, and look forward to watching them hunt through the Pacific together this upcoming season.

It’s all also telling how when people have reasonable access to see your games, they become fans. What a concept, how 20th century of them.

I don’t just watch now because I want to see hockey. I want to see discipline, dedication, sacrifice, selflessness, and relentless fury all in concert to a common goal. When delivered at the highest level, as the Hurricanes just put on display, that’s what makes sports so special. That’s why people watch. That’s why people care.

The Dead Tradeline

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Monday, August 3rd, 6 PM Eastern. The 2026 MLB trade deadline.

A trade deadline used to loom on the horizon like a Leviathan just beneath the surface. It would emerge and reshape the entire pennant race as all-stars on ending contracts were reshuffled from the bottom of the league to the championship contenders. Sometimes creating super teams, like the 2017 Astros, where the addition of Verlander and a few well-placed dugout trash cans were enough for Houston to steal a championship. 

I still follow the deadline closely, watching Foul Territory post videos each day with the latest rumors, reading articles online about who might go where.

The big fish this year is Tarik Skubal. He’s on a surging Detroit team that just a couple months ago wasn’t certain he would be pitching again this season. The combination of his return to action, Kevin McConigle’s hot bat, and Spencer Torkelson’s rise, 15 homers on the year thus far, have the Tigers in a precarious position. Just a handful of games out of the final Wild Card spot, with their playoff odds sitting somewhere in the 20-25% range depending on who you ask. In the last 24 hours Skubal’s odds of being traded on Kalshi have grown from 65 to 70%, but a 7/10 chance of trade for a guy that is guaranteed to walk after this is surprising. A weak American League that still feels wide open is another culprit in this landscape as well. Could they be foolish enough to hang onto Skubal and get nothing in return? Only the Angels could have pulled something like that off, and they did in a sense when they could have moved Ohtani for a king’s ransom before the 2023 season, but held on, he got hurt, and they got nothing. But more on them later. 

The impact of the expanded postseason on the trade deadline can’t be understated. It is one of several factors that has rewritten how the midsummer major league musical chairs play out. With two additional Wild Card spots, significantly more teams are in contention this time of year than would have been before. My old friends, the Boston Red Sox, who have had a disastrous year by all accounts and expectations, sit just 2.5 games back from the third Wild Card spot. They sit at 43-48 today, a better record than the vibes and the Boston media coverage would indicate. 

While they have found some momentum lately, including a recent sweep of the Yankees, they have no business considering themselves buyers at this deadline. But the slim possibility of a returning Crochet and Anthony, along with Craig Breslow’s desperation to save his general manager job, could have them thinking twice at the deadline three weeks from now.

The Red Sox need to sell; starting with Sonny Gray, Aroldis Chapman, and Jarren Duran. Restocking the cupboard that has borne less fruit than expected with the triumvirate of Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, and Kristian Campbell — from varying degrees of disappointment to disaster — should be the priority. The faltering young core has them much further away from a championship window than it appeared just four months ago.

Breslow is also proof positive of the harm playing fast and loose at the trade deadline can do to a team. He gave up James Tibbs for two months of the herbivore Dustin May, and then, this past offseason, sent Kyle Harrison — one of the top left-handed pitching prospects in baseball, owner of a 2.82 ERA that has swelled a bit after a few recent rough starts, and the headline piece coming back in the Devers deal — to Milwaukee for Caleb “What is baseball?” Durbin. I think Caleb knows what baseball is, but he doesn’t often play like it.

The expanded Wild Card slots are not the only factor in why the motion at the deadline is down. Prospects are now hitting the big leagues in stride thanks to a multitude of reasons. Young starlings like Kevin McGonigle, Konnor Griffin, and a wave of other rookies forcing their way into everyday lineups are having an enormous impact upon arrival. Pitching machines that can replicate major league arms, pitch sequences, and velocity have shortened the learning curves for young players in a major way. Parting with a young and desirable prospect is giving up what might be a valuable and cost-controlled near- and long-term asset for a little extra postseason juice for one season.

There has been a glimmer of hope for how the trade deadline can get its mojo back. Part of a recent proposal by the owners to the MLBPA included the ability to trade future draft picks (I’ll cover the likelihood this labor dispute kills the 2027 season in greater detail in a future post). It’s something that seems absurd that it isn’t already possible. Adding the ability to trade future draft picks adds immediate liquidity to the trade market. If a small-market team like Milwaukee wants to make a move to get this team over the hump for a World Series, trading future assets allows them to do so without parting with players currently in their farm system they covet. Seeing the Brewers trade five future first-round picks to shore up this year’s team to the point of getting a World Series title would not only be incredible to witness, it may change the calculus for how strongly small-market teams are able to compete in October. It would also be interesting to see how the wild big-market big spenders like the Mets — who seem willing at times to completely throw caution to the wind in pursuit of success ($42 million a year to Bichette anyone?) — and the “I Ain’t As Good As I Once Was, But I’m As Good Once As I Ever Was” Phillies (they owe $647m to players age 33 and up) would use that new currency to mortgage their futures and truly push their chips in for a title.

Just 24 days out from this year’s deadline, we may not have seen the last of the fireworks for America 250, but we may see more alligator arms from GMs who aren’t ready to truly play their hand. If this deadline is another dud, at least there’s hope for more electric moves at the wire in the future.

Whatever happens, I don’t think anything could be more absurdly amusing than when the Angels were both hot and cold at the buzzer in 2023 — buying Giolito, Lopez, Leone, Cron, and Grichuk before the deadline, then turning around a month later and putting four of them on waivers just to dump the salary, getting absolutely nothing back for any of it. That’s not strategy, that’s just Angels baseball. There’s only one Arte Moreno.

Goon Squad

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What do you call PornHub being blocked in 25 states?

A good start.

The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states.

This is due to age-verification laws. These laws vary state by state, but typically require visitors of a site with over a third of explicit content to submit a government ID or other form of age authentication. Louisiana was the first state to enact such a bill a couple of years ago, and now others have followed suit. In June, the Supreme Court deemed Texas’s age-verification law constitutional, setting a precedent for such bills that come before and after.

— Source: Mashable

Introducing Mr. & Priestess Kelce-Swift

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Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift eloped this past Friday at a celebrity-filled ceremony in Madison Square Garden. The happy couple announced they plan to start a family.

This finally answers one of the biggest questions of the twenty-first century:

When will the Antichrist be born?