Oh dear.

Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #442
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟢🟢🟢🟢
🟣🟣🟣🟣
🔵🔵🔵🔵
Play the puzzle: www.theathletic.com/connections/...

Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #440
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🔵🔵🔵🔵
🟢🟢🟢🟢
🟣🟣🟣🟣
Play the puzzle: www.theathletic.com/connections/...

Oh dear.

Oh, I’m so sorry, Raffi. Much love to you and your family!

This one was . . . odd.

Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #439
🟣🟣🟣🟣
🟢🟢🟢🟢
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🔵🔵🔵🔵
Play the puzzle: www.theathletic.com/connections/...

This one combined many of my least-favorite sports topics. Hard! Why isn’t there, erm, more BIATHLON and CURLING in the Connections puzzle?

Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #437
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🔵🔵🔵🔵
🟢🟢🟢🟢
🟣🟣🟣🟣
Play the puzzle: www.theathletic.com/connections/...

*This* does seem accurate, tbf.

Come on! Would a 74-year-old always be listening to the “freshest releases?”

Mixed messages, Spotify.

Someday, I vow, I’ll immediately rally, spitting back (text from the greatest protest signs) “That’s Mr. F to you.”

And this very year, I wasn’t sure if a young woman who passed me on the sidewalk, two blocks from my home, was calling me the F word or, for some reason, saying it to someone on her cellphone.

“I would bet that any gay man who has been called a faggot, whether spat by a bully or muttered by his own father, remembers when and where it happened.”

I vividly remember the F word being muttered at me from one of a group of four men on the streets of downtown Beacon, N.Y. in 2010.