The 2013 Year In Review

In sports, Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, Tyson Gay—the once bulked-up, mythologized sports heroes of yesteryear, the suspended, lawyered-up cheats of today. Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o became perhaps the first Heisman contender to have to make up a girlfriend before killing her off, spurring a new meme Te’o’ing.

But, take hope. It wasn’t all bad in 2013:

San Francisco transformed itself into Gotham City to make 5-year-old-leukemia-survivor-turned-Bat-Kid Miles’ dreams come.

Pope Francis ushered in a fresh era in the Vatican. An age of transparency to cast aside the shutters of Vatican accounting opaqueness and child abuse.

Fathers and sons everywhere grew misty-eyed as New York Yankee closer Mariano Rivera bid farewell to the game with a pinstriped regality and grace.

There was also Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”:

AMC’s “Breaking Bad” joined “The Sopranos” in the pantheon of greatest dramas of all time. And Netflix—the S&P 500’s best-performing stock of 2013—validated our binge viewing and may have saved TV as we know it with “House of Cards”, “Orange Is The New Black”, and reviving “Arrested Development”.

HERO OF THE YEAR

“I knew something was wrong when a pretty little girl ran into a black man’s arms,” the rescuer told reporters. “Dead giveaway.”

The reporter tried to hold it together. He hemmed and he hawed. He chomped down on his lower lip. Anything to keep from laughing.

Rescuers weren’t supposed to talk that way. Rescuers weren’t supposed to have a laundry list of charges against them, either: domestic violence, burglary, drug abuse, etc.

And on Charles Ramsey rattled: how he ran over with his half-eaten Big Mac when he heard the screams. How he kicked in the front door to free Amanda Berry. How the kidnapper Ariel Castro was just a guy next door he used to “eat ribs with”.