RON SEIBEL: No TV or internet? Time to call an audible

My relationship with technology is a love-hate affair.

The things we can do with connectivity and portable computing devices are amazing. Take your entire music collection with you while out on a run? Watch virtually any professional sporting event on a screen as small as a deck of cards or as large as the side of a building without being tied down to a cable? Definitely welcome developments.

But when one thing goes haywire with that technology — a storm, a cut trunk line, a software update that didn’t take right, a gremlin fed after midnight — then those welcome developments become nothing more than giant headaches.

When I received a text from my better half around the time Friday night’s Peach County-Lee County football game ended saying cable and internet were down, I didn’t have a good feeling. Sure, I had a way to connect in order to finish work for the evening, but I knew an extended outage, likely triggered by the strong storms that were in the area Friday night, could potentially run into Saturday college football viewing.

Sure enough, cable and internet were still down in the morning. But college football viewing wouldn’t be our only issue.

We decided to head out to breakfast. The first place we went had its payment system fall victim to the online outage. We eventually found a place that could accommodate us, but the experience was just another example of how our society is tied up in the internet — and how things can quickly go haywire if that connectivity goes down.

At lunchtime, we began to toss around ideas for how to spend the rest of the day. Go to the establishment an hour away where we sometimes watch NFL games? Stick around town and hope for the best? Pop a movie in the Blu-Ray player and forget there’s such a thing as college football?

Or maybe go old-school and dig out the radio in the closet … there still is such a thing as football games on the radio, right?

If only Larry Munson were still around …

Mind those fingernails, Braves fans: We’ve got ourselves an honest-to-goodness playoff race involving the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies. Who would have expected that back in March, especially with the mediocre seasons both teams had in 2017?

The waters have been choppy the past couple of days for Braves fans. A three-game Braves losing streak heading into Saturday, combined with a two-game Phillies winning streak, cut the Braves’ lead in the NL East to two games.

Whichever team loses that race will be in a similar nail-biter for the two wild-card spots. The Phillies began Saturday two games behind Milwaukee for the second wild-card position, with St. Louis slightly ahead in the top wild-card spot.

The Braves and Phillies face each other seven times in the season’s final two weeks. That’s how you decide a playoff race.

Contact sports editor Ron Seibel at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @RonSeibel.