Rev up your Mr. Fusion and tighten up that automatically sizable jacket, because today is the day loaded with projections, conjecture and certainly a large amount of guesstimation. (That word, will be officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary soon, it’s Emjoi will be added in 2027.)
Today is October 21, 2015, the day in which Doc Brown and Marty McFly (we always forget to mention Jennifer, for some reason) came back from the past, made a quick stop in the present and are headed to in Back to the Future II.
And while the flying cars and hoverboards that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale envisioned as being commonplace in their version of 2015 still exist only in the imagination of third graders and vastly overfunded experimental government R&D labs, there is plenty about the Future that came, more or less, true.
Video telephone calls? Sorry AT&T, Skype and FaceTime figured that one out first. Jaws 19 in 3D? Well, the Mosasaurus from the Jurassic franchise proved to be far more visually stunning (and probably box-office successful) than the great Great White, but they certainly nailed the excess number of sequels (are you listening Tiresome and Tedious, I mean, Fast & Furious) and the (now IMAX) 3D thing. Nike Mag sneakers with power laces? New click-to-tighten, quick-release lacing systems are darn close, ensuring that children born this year and beyond may never have to learn about the sad rabbit.
But more sadly, the No. 1 wild and crazy prediction of Back to the Future II now appears as distant a hope as the flying DeLorean. Down 3-0 in the National League Championship Series – a deficit only one team has ever rebounded from – it would take lightning striking the clocktower twice for the Chicago Cubs to come back and even make it to a World Series, let alone win another four games to fulfill the dream of North Siders and sci-fi geeks far and wide.
30 years ago, Major League Baseball and NHL hockey might have seemed only a dream to Colorado sports fans. A Super Bowl title certainly felt that way. And an NBA title? Well, three out of four ain’t bad, right?
Indeed, the sports landscape here in this dusty cow town, once a stop en route to a gold rush and now the destination for the “green rush,” has changed dramatically since Marty McFly found his way back to Hill Valley and back and again (how’s that for a space-time continuum displacement?). Here in Denver, we’ve seen the build of four new stadiums and the demolition of two (not to mention an airport), the rise of a game once played only at east coast prep schools and we sent a missile to win a handful of medals at the Olympic games, among dozens of other accomplishments.
What will come to pass in the next 30 years of Denver sports? We fired up the flux-capacitor and sent Danny Williams and Marcello Romano of Morning Mayhem and Benny Bash of The Big Show into Denver 2045 to get an idea of what things look like in the future. Curiously, they found two starkly different Mile High Cities.
Danny and Cello visit Titletown | Benny sees a sports (and other) desert