PRESS PIGSKIN PROGNOSTICATORS Aye, Kennedys: We'll drink to that

Personal fouls will perhaps proliferate in today’s NFL games. The Chicago Bears, rumor has it, might even be flagged for impersonating a professional football team.

But here in the land of your Coeur d’Alene Press All-Star Pigskin Prognosticators? There are no turkeys, only doves. And a dog named Buster, of course.

Thanksgiving Day is the one reprieve from smacktalk awards and competitive taunts from the 11 heroes playing for 11 fabulous local nonprofits. The top winners, as you know, will land free Press advertising packages for their beneficiaries.

Today our pigskin periscope peers clear across the pond to the Emerald Isle, where one of the best sports in our local contest gathered with a couple of his brothers this week. Mike Kennedy of Intermax Networks succeeded in fulfilling a personal mission while prodigiously draining pints, as a number of alarmed Irish publicans will nervously attest.

But there was a serious side to this trip: It was a journey of love; of a promise kept.

Mike returned to Ireland for the first time in 31 years. He and brothers John, the eldest and a Boston resident, and middle brother Charlie of New York City, gathered in Galway, their grandmother’s hometown.

“We were there to give our parents their last sendoff into the Galway Bay, as they wished,” Mike said via email. “It took us a few years to get this done after our parents, Carol and Charlie Kennedy, passed, but it was worth the wait.”

Kennedy’s father’s parents, Nora Murray and John Kennedy, immigrated into New York from Ireland in the early 20th century.

“My mother’s ancestors (the Dukes) were from there too, a few generations back.”

And the trip, Michael me boy? How was it?

“It was a joyful and loving celebration of our folks and the whole feckin’ clan,” Kennedy concluded.

The Kennedy lads might have been a wee bit late, but their timing near Thanksgiving could hardly have been better.

Because when the last game finally ends for each of us, this is really what it’s all about.

Family.

Cheers, mates.