The first thing I did, after the Eagles won the Super Bowl—what an implausible sequence of words!—was call my father. We both said the same thing, simultaneously: “Holy shit.” We didn’t know how to feel or behave. (Apparently, to go by a few of the legion of fans who descended on downtown Philadelphia after the game, we should have been preparing to eat horse manure or jump off the awning of the Ritz.) My father grew up going to Eagles games with his mother and stepfather. He was at Franklin Field when the team won its last championship, in 1960. There followed nearly sixty lean years. I, born in New York to Philadelphians, have endured the majority of those years in his camp—an Eagles fan by blood, if not by home town.
I hesitate to admit in public, and to my bosses, how much time I have devoted, in the past four decades, to watching Eagles games. But here goes: my math comes to about two thousand hours. (Mastery apparently takes a lifetime.) This does not include murky early-childhood recollections of Kelly-green configurations on a TV screen in Conshohocken, the Trinitron a kind of hearth, menfolk huddled around, caring a lot. The earliest fixable memory may be the Miracle at the Meadowlands, in 1978, when the New York Giants, comfortably in the lead and killing the final seconds, fumbled a hand-off, allowing the Philadelphia cornerback Herman Edwards to scoop up the ball and scoot in for a game-stealing touchdown. I was nine—which was about the size, in inches, of the TV screen. The jubilations of my father and me as Joe Pisarcik got punked caused my younger brother, age seven, and then a Giants fan, to cry for an hour. That night, he switched allegiances—and became, in due course, one of the most devout Eagles fans I know. (The bar is high, no doubt.)
That season, like the next thirty-eight, would end in heartbreak. The Eagles made the playoffs and played the Atlanta Falcons. It was Christmas Eve. We were at my grandparents’ house, in Wayne, Pennsylvania, standing anxiously in the den, dressed for (and now late for) the church service, as the Eagles lined up for a game-winning field goal.* The kick is up. And it’s . . . no good? Eagles lose: get used to it, kid. But life goes on.
Life kept going on, year after year, but, more often than not, duties or deadlines be damned, I was in front of a television set every Sunday (or Monday, or—pox on the league—Thursday) to test the proposition. One learns how to stumble upon the Eagles bar, wherever one travels or lives. Or else you find ways to make it through an afternoon at a regular every-team sports bar, with a half-dozen games going on a couple of dozen TVs. Reporting a piece a few years ago about a Berlin night club, where I’d resolved to spend thirty-six hours straight, I escaped the club’s cavernous darkness for a few hours by taking a breather in an American sports pub, where I had a burger and watched the Birds beat the Lions in a blizzard. (The quarterback was Nick Foles, once and future backup, and Sunday night’s M.V.P., who was then in the midst of a freakishly successful season, playing at a level he’d fail to reach again until this past month.) So I remember a Sunday here and there. But, mostly, the games and seasons are a blur of high hopes, dashed expectations, and afternoon pints—a burpy “Groundhog Day” set to an alarm-clock soundtrack of “Fly, Eagles, Fly.”
I could certainly recite a catechism of disappointment (Q.: What is the chief end of man? A.: Stickum, Fog Bowl, Pukegate) or type up a long list of the players and coaches who seemed destined to break its grip—some now unmentionable, most still dear. But that would mean a page of names, and you’d either skip over them or pick through them for the ones that are missing. Anyway, Eagles fans aren’t the only ones to have wandered in the wilderness. We can save our rehashings for conversations during commercials at Wogies.
There are many Americans who think that football is too cruel, or too violent, anyway, or who can’t bear the atmosphere of chauvinism, or the glacial pace of the games. Some want more protest, others want less. Most sensible people know better than to care about the outcome of a game played by millionaire strangers, on behalf of billionaire strangers, amid so much bombast and cant, not to mention brain damage. But the unsated lifelong fan, whether or not he agrees with such criticisms or perspectives, is helpless as his little green men, on bigger and bigger screens, tote the ball up and down the field as though his life depends on it. And it really feels like it does.
So here, suddenly, on Sunday night, was a delectably close and crazy game, with players on both teams making breathtaking plays, back and forth, and the outcome in doubt until the very end. It was, by a lot of markers, an extraordinary football game, but the partisan appreciates such a thing only in the context of its outcome. Let’s be honest: despite the bluster of so many Eagles fans in the past couple weeks—their assertions that the Birds, position by position, might actually be better than the Patriots—it’s hard to imagine that any of these fans really could dare to expect that they might actually win the whole thing, both because they never had and because, once they’d again failed to, it would sting too much.
When Tom Brady’s last Hail Mary pass knocked harmlessly to the turf and the game was sealed (Quakers over Pilgrims, 41–33), my father and I, and many fellow-lifers (and I’m talking about those of us who did not have a hankering for mayhem or horse dung) tried to make sense of this alien sensation. Was it merely the absence of sting—an ending, just not the usual bad one? Or was it rapture, the cessation of anxiety and fear, the solution to all my problems? I think it was—and remains, in the light of the following afternoon—something in between. It’s a happy culmination of those two thousand hours, fostering a brief and no doubt temporary conviction that they were all well spent, every single minute of them, in front of TVs near and far.
What now?
*A previous version of this article misidentified the team that missed a game-winning field goal.
