Jim Souhan

MINNEAPOLIS - Soccer was their refuge. Growing up in a remote orphanage in Kudymkar, Russia, Alex, Jake and Roma survived bullying and worse. Afternoons, they would kick a weathered ball around a dirt lot, aiming at a goal lacking a net.

The fields are more plush in the United States. So are their lives. Saturday, in front of the adoptive parents who rescued them, the boys will play for the St. Croix and Apple Valley soccer clubs in the U-17 Minnesota State Cup championship game and revel in the international game that helped them grow American roots.

Once your couch sores heal and you undergo a very specific form of liposuction to remove queso from the arteries nearest your heart, I hope you'll realize what you just experienced:

The best weekend in American sports.

The NFL playoffs provided drama (the 49ers improbably coming back to beat the Saints), upsets (the 49ers and Giants winning to advance to an improbable NFC Championship Game), emotion (49ers tight end Vernon Davis crying as he hugged his coach), storylines (the quarterback who fathered a child out of wedlock, Tom Brady, beating the quarterback who says he's a virgin, Tim Tebow), and two days that gave us all an excuse to sit inside by the fireplace pretending we'd really rather be at the gym.

MINNEAPOLIS -- We should appreciate Jim Thome's 600th home run almost as much for what it wasn't as for what it was, and what it was was one of the rarest feats in sports history, celebrated with a tastefulness and reserve as unique as the achievement itself.

Fewer men have hit 600 home runs in the big leagues than have walked on the moon. Of the eight men who have hit 600, only five have done so absent steroid accusations. Thome now belongs to a subset of ballplayers almost as small and elite as the cast of the original Beatles.

He joins Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Ken Griffey Jr. as one of the five to reach 600 without hearing so much as a

Baseball never has been better. If you don't agree, that's because you are so old your prostate is now bigger than your brain.

To believe that baseball was once better than it is today is to believe that music was once better than it is today because the only band you can remember is the Beatles. You have forgotten about the thousands of bands who weren't the Beatles, and the one band that was, unfortunately, Herman's Hermits.

HAVEN, Wis. -- They stood high above their masterpiece, taking in a view resembling a watercolor.

On Monday night, Brett Favre took a break from being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

On this night, Favre became more than a displaced Green Bay Packer wrapped in an old-school Minnesota Viking uniform inside a dome that once haunted his dreams.