As usual I was at Whole Foods waiting for Bunny to decide which sushi she’d buy and trying to avoid the wrath of the sullen country girl. So why not while away the time with a little automated health check, sitting down at the machine.

Bunny is in training for the race this weekend, so she was motivated to show that her blood pressure etc was better than mine. And after the cuff squeezed me to show that the country girl has given me borderline hypertension, I was delighted to win the blood oxygenation race, even if the machine says I am otherwise about to die.

You stick your finger in a little slit and the machine pulls on it, but not to get an equal and opposite reaction. Instead it reads out a percentage--I suppose of blood oxygen suffusion. Bunny was 96 percent or something like that. Mine showed up 98 and blinked at 100 just as I was removing my finger. A perfect score! Just like my SATs. If only I could re-insert and repeat it.

There is often such a fine line in our greatest accomplishments.

You know F. Scott Fitzgerald was a famous writer and, later, when he was more like a washed up drunk whoring his talents in Hollywood with less integrity and self-respect than the country girl, he actually worked on the script of the famous movie Gone With The Wind. Maybe you have seen it.

After doing lots of florid scribbling and collecting his pay, he ended up contributing one word to the script by the time of the final editing. An outrage you say, but here’s the debate: That one word addition was arguably the most famous one in the movie. If you can write in and tell me what it was, I have got a gift certificate to eat at Mudtown for you.

So Bunny called me two days later, delighted to inform me that a 100 percent score on the test is a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning! Other than the country girl trying to smother me with a pillow one night (such is her incessant craving for attention) I could not think how that could be. But I was sorely disappointed to go from nearly having it all to such an abject failure.

But I also had a thought, given all the talk of how Alabama can still get to the National Championship--amid so many fine variables.

And it is such a fine line that put them in this position of being outside looking in. I watched the replay several times and I would still swear Bama’s tight end caught the ball at the goal line and it was not wrestled away till he as down on the ground.

But oh what if Bama had not floated a pass from a wide receiver on an ailing ankle when it was moving the ball at LSU’s 28-yard line. And what if there were no block(s) in the back on the interception return. They would have won even if they had fielded a punt at the 50 yard line instead of letting it roll for a 77-yard flip in field position. Yes, they lost when they should have won the game.

Never mind what if they could kick a field goal. And let’s not even get started on the total overtime debacle.

In that forgettable series, Trent proved two years in a row he does not catch the ball well with his back to onrushing defenders. Then AJ failed to hit Trent as an open receiver, asking for a sideline tightrope catch not even Maze has made in last two games, uncharacteristically failing to keep his feet in bounds. Then of course you can’t run into a defender and take a sack on third down when your field goal kicker is already suffering from low biorhythms.

Just like the Tide, I tried several times that day with Bunny to replicate my perfect oxygen score but stalled out at 98 and could not regain the peak. But, wait just a second, it later turned out I did not want that 100 percent even if the country girl would just as soon terminate my existence.

Meanwhile, I have heard a lot of trivial details of how Alabama can get back into the SEC championship and claim its rightful crown(s).

There are so many variables. It helped for Stanford and Boise to lose, but can Oregon or Oklahoma jump over a one-loss Bama? And the main scenario involves Arkansas helping us out by beating LSU for us.

But could Arkansas then jump us though we beat them badly, or could LSU go to the SEC game anyway, sadly. As it has been explained several times, that would go, given an Arkansas victory over LSU leaving all three teams with one loss, to the seventh tie-breaker under SEC rules.

In the case of a three-way tie in the conference records, the team with the highest BCS ranking out of the top two will go, unless the second team is ranked within five places of the first--then the tie-breaker goes to head to head meeting. So if Ala and LSU end up ranked the two highest, within five places of each other, LSU would go anyway. So Bama needs Arkie to jump LSU in the rankings. This is the very stuff of neurosis.

But just like Bunny and the country girl have both gotten many second chances, there is another potential positive scenario for Bama.

Forget about tiebreaker number 7. Let LSU go to Atlanta. As of this writing I have never heard it contemplated, but what if we just let LSU go with the hope that they lose to rejuvenated Georgia?

Is the SEC champion, even if it is a two-loss Georgia manhandled by Boise, going to go to the NC ahead of Bama to play Oklahoma State?

And what if OK State loses to OK? Then you will be wide open to choose from the field of Alabama, Oklahoma, Oregon, and even a rematch with SEC loser LSU. Or maybe the rematch will pit one-lossers OK and OK State?

There is a lot of minute trivia there for discussion. Bama needs, for example, Oklahoma to beat Oklahoma State and Oregon to lose to Southern Cal and Georgia to lose to Georgia Tech before throttling LSU (and maybe even with LSU going to the SEC game anyway under rule 7 after losing to Arkansas), leaving an NC game, after all this fuss from actually playing the season, with a championship game between the pre-season predicted contenders, Alabama and Oklahoma.

That would be a good game, with two teams backing in from opposite directions--Bama lost a game against a great team that it should have won and how Oklahoma lost to Texas Tech is another mystery for the ages like the shroud of Turin. Good luck with it all. I will try my best just to keep my finger in the dyke and not to suffocate, or get suffocated.