“O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.
Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love’s tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:
Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.
O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;
And then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.”
(Thomas Dekker, 1599)
FOR so many reasons, May is considered one happy month indeed.
Growing up in a Catholic country like the Philippines, May for me was always about “Flores de Mayo,” as our aunts would often bring us to church with pretty flowers to-hand, which we would enthusiastically offer to Mother Mary.
As I grew up, became worldly-wise and acquainted with things beyond our shores, I started to associate May with end of season sports extravaganzas. In my younger days, it was the NBA playoffs that caught my fancy. Years later, exposure to the European parts of the world altered my likes and dislikes, and May as a basketball-filled time of year gave way to the European Champions League semi-finals, and also the thrilling end-of-season run-ins in the Premier League.
Just this week, the month lived up to its merry reputation indeed–from a footballing sense, that is.
Two epic matches in two days produced some of the most unforgettable moments in sports, matches that would possibly go down in history as some of the most thrilling ever played, in any sport.
On Tuesday, May 7, it was Barcelona and Liverpool, contesting the second leg of a tie that saw Barcelona put three goals past the English side during their first game in Spain. With the Spanish side boasting arguably the world’s best player in Argentinean Lionel Messi, no one expected Liverpool to overcome the seemingly insurmountable task on the back of the results of the first game. What happened then needs to be watched to be believed. Ninety minutes of breathless football not only saw Liverpool going toe to toe with the world’s best, but also scoring one more goal than their opponents did, sending them to their second final in two years. Extraordinary, miraculous, unbelievable. You will run out superlatives for this game, but hold on, another one following close on its heels is equally even more unbelievable.
This time, another English team in Tottenham Hotspurs scored a late winner 15 seconds before the end of stoppage time, sending their fans into fits of rapturous delight. Trailing 0-1 after the first game and going down 0-2 at half-time in the second game of the tie, they managed somehow--and I can’t really describe how they did it, except to say that no one would have ever believed it to be possible--to put three past the Dutch champions Ajax to face fellow Premier League team Liverpool in the championship game in Madrid, in what promises to be one of the most-watched sporting spectacles of all time, the day after the month of May ends.
And so the merry month of May, oh the merry month of May, remains as merry as ever, even into the first day of June.