People we hate – this is as opposed to people, comma, we hate – like to criticize Al Michaels for not seeming properly effusive about some idiotic false start penalty in a nothing-versus-nothing match played on Thursday night and televised on Jeff Bezos’s premier home surveillance tool. This is all fair, but honestly, Michaels has seen it all a thousand times over his long career; it would be not only weird but concerning if he were to scream and shout about the usual nonsense like an unhinged post-Ritalin Kevin Harlan. It’s just the Jaguars on a weeknight, and the guy just turned 80.

But Thursday night’s Steelers-Browns game, a blizzard of field lines and penalty flags, left Michaels absolutely giddy. The ultimate television lifer your 7-year-old became on Christmas morning, full of wonder and delight and processed sugar, immersing himself in his performance as if each piece were a piece of sirloin steak with a double-fried potato the size of your spaniel’s head and a Balvenie on the side, neatly – all fed to him with forks by squeezing with forks by Jane Fonda around Barbara.

And in matters of faith like this, we must trust Michaels implicitly. The Browns are mostly terrible, the Steelers are living on the heels of Chris Boswell and Mike Tomlin’s ability to beat people into submission – in other words, this game should have reeked of all the bad aromas that Thursday’s schedule usually provides. In normal weather there is every reason to assume that this would have been the toughest sit.

Instead, amid all this Lake Effect carnage, it was magic: pure, unadulterated CGI as offered by the Prime Minister of Greenland. It was the first real bad-weather game of the season, and it was funny and cinematic enough to make you negotiate selling one or more of your kids for more of the same. When we said bad weather, we mean it horrible– glorious, blinding, continuous, windy showers that dumped little pyramids of snow on every helmet, yoke and cap brim. When Michaels said late in the game, after the Steelers had taken the lead, 19-18, “29 degrees, on the shores of Lake Erie,” he was using the tone he must have used to propose to his wife, and he seemed utterly fascinated by an almost disturbing degree of the thousands of Browns fans who refused to leave the stadium even as the snow climbed up to their calves. “Nobody’s gone,” he shouted later, in the voice of a man who not only seemed ready, but eager to stay all night himself.

But it had to end. The home fans were ultimately rewarded with the joyful hypothermia that comes with watching their orange hats blow a 12-point fourth-quarter lead and still go on to win, 24-19. Nick Chubb came in from the…oh, who cares? It snowed all night like midwinter on Neptune, there were two punts that traveled fifty feet or less, and no one involved seemed to be able to see very well. This calls into question your betting odds, your fantasy team, your playoff and draft position projections, even your love for traditional rivalries and all those other stupid NFL myths. More than debatable, actually. Sub-stupid. Yep, that’s the hyphen we were looking for.

But that’s the beauty of football in seriously bad weather. For all its mechanized grimness and the overproduced sameness that makes every NFL game look like every other NFL game, playing a football game in snow and mud makes almost all of the league’s antisocial fetishes less crushingly apparent, and makes the game noticeably more game-like. Since there was no mud on Thursday night, the snow had to carry the show, and it did: the field was white, with only the rough break of the garden lines that some killjoy wanted to plow repeatedly so people could figure out where the ball was . was. As if that mattered. When Michaels lost sight of Boswell’s second field goal, he explained the entire event in its magnificent Siberian totality – with amused bewilderment and bewildered amusement.

That’s why domed stadiums inherently suck — just ask the Tampa Bay Rays. Therefore, perfect conditions that give all players the best opportunity to excel are the enemy of all that is right and good, and all that is best about sports. That’s why the NFL season shouldn’t start until mid-November, when the weather is at least mild and the plays look less like choreography and more like primordial slog. And who doesn’t like their slog to be as primordial as possible?

Our Al certainly not. He hasn’t been this happy since he found out he was traded by ESPN for the rights to Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, and that was 18 years ago. Ask your parents. They’ll explain it while you’re shoveling out their driveway on Thanksgiving morning and expect you to be damn cheerful about it.