USA Mortgage presents What Just Happened? Vol. 94

Saturday’s Vanderbilt vs. Missouri football game was a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie gone wrong. The nation tuned in expecting one thing, but it received something … a little off.

A small-town baker — who worries she might lose her business because she can’t stop giving away cupcakes to downtrodden vagrants and ragamuffin kids — feels sad over the holidays because she misses her father, who taught her how to bake but died in a bizarre gingerbread explosion on Christmas Eve a decade ago. She is visited unexpectedly by her high school sweetheart, now a wealthy corporate lawyer in New York. He has instructions from his client, a soulless developer specializing in predatory payday loan establishments, to talk her into selling the bakery to him before the bank forecloses on it. Initially they squabble, because he used to be an idealistic lad who planned to be a civil rights attorney, and he has become everything he once loathed. But when he tries one of her éclairs, something changes in him. They take a walk around the town square reminiscing and enjoying the colorful lights as snowflakes fall. As they share a kiss under the clock tower, he realizes his old hometown is where he really belongs, and he plans to rekindle his old romance and invest some of his fortune in the improvements the bakery needs to avoid future explosions and foreclosure.

Then he wakes up Christmas morning, realizes he’d be bored stiff hanging around with the bumpkins in this backwater and catches the next flight to the Big Apple without so much as a text to the baker.

The End.

If Hallmark movies have taught us anything, it’s that the underdog wins in the end, or least gets to try a PAT along the way. But Vanderbilt football is an unreliable narrator, and in this version, Sarah Fuller had to settle for one squib kick in a 41-0 loss, and the coach who gave her the chance to become the first woman to play in a Power 5 football game was canned the next day.