While we were all busily running around last week (and the week before that, and the month before that, and the half-year before that) worrying about the giant pile of suck that is the economy, race relations in this country got better about ... 7.5 days ago.
And, as with many such events, the improvement was not in what was said or done but what wasn't said or done.
Did it ever occur to you, while you watched the Super Bowl (or the ads in between punts and Larry Fitzgerald 50-yard sprints), that we might get our second black Super Bowl winning coach?
Our second in three years?
And that half of the Super Bowl's head coaches in the last three years have been black men?
And that for the first time ever, the winning coach and the MVP of the game were black?
And that there was scant mention of that first item and basically none (at least, that I heard or read) of the others?
I heard lots of talk about how Mike Tomlin was poised to become the youngest Super Bowl-winning coach.
Nothing about the color of his skin.
Nothing about how he would be the second black coach to win it all.
Because then-Indianapolis Colts Head Coach Tony Dungy had answered all those fundamental questions (many of them multiple times) for Mike Tomlin two years previously -- when he or Chicago Bears Head Coach Lovie Smith would become the first black coach to win the Super Bowl.
A black coach who had played quarterback at a college in the North (where his coach was the man who would be his offensive coordinator in Indianapolis) and was signed by the Pittsburgh Steelers -- as a defensive back -- and won a Super Bowl with them (making him the only black person to win a Super Bowl as a player and as a coach) before coming back as a coach for them before he went to Tampa Bay, where he hired Mike Tomlin to coach the defensive backs ... he had already answered those questions.
That left the reporters to ask questions about the game.
And that left the coach to answer questions about the game.
And that left the country and the world to think about the game.