Sesame Street Just Trolled The Patriots And #DeflateGate

Turn on the news. Look on Twitter or Facebook. Listen to the radio. #DeflateGate is pretty much all anybody's talking about. Everyone seems to be enjoying poking fun at it, and now a surprising source has gotten in on the action.

Well, maybe.

Venerable children's TV show/institution Sesame Street aired an episode today that some are interpreting as an intentional jab at the Patriots and #DeflateGate. As Sesame Street viewers know, every episode these days features a "Word On the Street," aka a word-of-the-day that's heard repeatedly throughout the episode. It also gets its own spotlight in a short celebrity guest segment that puts them alongside a Muppet.

Care to guess what today's Word On the Street was?

Inflate.

In a segment featuring actor Don Cheadle and Elmo, "inflate" is demonstrated by Cheadle blowing up a beach ball.

To be fair, this episode of Sesame Street was not a new one, so the segment wasn't produced as a commentary on #DeflateGate. It originally aired in April of 2013. But it's common for Sesame Street to rerun episodes from the last few years. So if Sesame Street's producers ever makes a statement about this airing, they'll no doubt call it a fluke of the programming schedule.

But the timing is coincidental enough to raise some eyebrows. Could Sesame Street have scheduled its "inflate" episode for today on purpose, as a commentary on the New England Patriots? We may never know the truth.

Here's the episode's opening, featuring Murray the monster introducing the word inflate.

What do you think? Intentional?

Here's what people on Twitter had to say.