It’s a mixed-reviews time of year.

The food the past four days was fantastic, but most of us ate too much of it.

On one hand, there is nothing better than the holiday season and the (general) peace and togetherness it brings. On the other hand, it’s cold and the roads from here to your loved ones’ house are a slushy mess.

Multiple airings of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” are fun for the whole family. The absurdity of Michael Bolton being used to sell me a Honda every five minutes, not so much.

And so it goes along every avenue of life, including sports. To wit:

Good: The New England Patriots produced a top-10, all-time NFL comeback and a top-10 moment in franchise history with their overtime win over the Denver Broncos.

Is there anything more satisfying (and less surprising) than Tom Brady out-dueling Peyton Manning in a meaningful spot on national TV? Than Wes Welker dropping three passes at the end of regulation and in OT, then being reluctant to fair-catch the punt that led to a game-ending turnover? Than the national media being forced to reexamine its love affair with Mr. September and his bionic neck? Allow me to help you here. No, no there is not.

Bad: Those same Patriots remain wretched on the road, even against hideous opponents.

It took a double-digit comeback Sunday at Houston (2-10) to avoid losing four consecutive games away from the Razor for the first time since who-remembers-when. These struggles date back to December 2012, when the Patriots required late-game miracles to hold off the Jacksonville/London/Los Angeles Jaguars.

Blame two of this year’s defeats on a fourth-quarter monsoon in Cincinnati and Luke Kuechly’s unflagged mugging of Rob Gronkowski if you wish, but that doesn’t change the reality of spotty, uninspired play, and it doesn’t bode well for potential trips to Denver and/or Cincinnati in January.

Good: Can’t imagine a better, or more bizarre finish, to a football game than Chris Davis running around and through 10 fat guys and a kicker to cover 109 yards on the final play and give Auburn a 34-28 win over Alabama in Saturday’s Iron Bowl. Well, you know, other than it being an “official” national semifinal game and part of the flagrantly overdue four-team playoff that is supposedly on its way.

Bad: Before being benched in favor of freshman Adam Griffith, the unfortunate protagonist in Coach Nick Saban’s ill-advised, 57-yard attempt at the game-winner, the Crimson Tide’s Cade Foster missed three much shorter field goals. Which apparently, in the mind of his school’s most mentally erratic supporters, is a crime punishable by death.

The invective directed at Foster via his Twitter feed on Saturday night goes beyond a statewide embarrassment. It is symbolic of us all losing our mind and swapping our common sense for keyboard muscles.

I’m coming for you you gonna die tonight.

I’m gonna kill you and your family just FYI.

If you don’t kill yourself I will.

Drink bleach.

Wow. My suspicion about the sources of Alabama’s electronic wisdom is that the only thing they’ve ever successfully kicked is a puppy, and that the most athletic thing they did Saturday was a 12-ounce curl.

Cade Foster has nothing to fear, in other words. Society, however, should be very afraid. Our lack of self-control and decency represents a far greater loss than any sporting event.

Good: More than 10,000 of us gathered in Orono and Portland just over a week ago for the privilege of watching what was, almost indisputably, the greatest single weekend of high school football state championship games in history.

A painstaking reclassification effort by the Maine Principals’ Association — some eight years in the making, if you go back to recently retired Mt. Blue coach Gary Parlin’s initial proposal — was subjected to an autumn of analysis and snap judgments by those of us in the belly of the beast.

If you waited to draw those conclusions after the four games that mattered most, there is no question the administrators hit a grand slam. Two teams, Cony and Bonny Eagle, drove the length of the field in the final three minutes to win their titles. Another, Oak Hill, summoned a defensive stand to close out one of the highest scoring state games in history. And Leavitt and Winslow swapped haymakers for three quarters until the Hornets’ depth and diversity of talent simply proved too much. It was great theater, all of it.

Bad: Two days later, those athletes bandaged their wounds and stumbled into basketball, hockey, skiing, track or wrestling practice, all of them a week late.

Thanks to a late Thanksgiving and Maine’s unusual school vacation schedule, our high school fall and winter sports seasons overlapped this year. It only seems like a minor inconvenience until you consider that most of our high school athletes will endure more than a month of thumb-twiddling, video game-playing and potato chip-eating between the end of the winter season and the beginning of spring practice.

There’s really nothing the MPA can do to correct this quirk by themselves. We are a people slow to change traditions. While families in warmer-weather states are accustomed to a two-week spring break in March, our teachers, students and parents enjoy their separate recesses in February and April. And it is certain that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he carried four stone tablets — two bearing the Ten Commandments and two more documenting the February tournament schedules in Augusta and Bangor.

In a perfect world, our winter sports season would both begin and end two weeks later. It would make the transitions more uniform, giving bodies and minds the rest they need.

But I won’t hold my breath.

We have to learn to take the good with the bad, after all.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.