Every New Beginning

Losing sucks.  Hardly a head slapper, I know.  It just happens to be the lede this sunny but cold February Monday.

Having your pigskin heroes lose the Super Bowl is like Thanksgiving without any turkey leftovers.  When your team wins the Super Bowl, they don’t just win on Sunday.  They win on Monday and Tuesday and every time that clip from the big game shows up in the Sports Center intro.  When your team loses there are no highlights, no turkey sandwiches with stuffing and gravy, no turkey hash or turkey tetrazzini; an empty refrigerator redolent with regret and reminders of what might have been.

Any game your team loses hurts, of course, but playoff games – and obviously the Super Bowl – hurt a little more because of the irrevocable finality of the outcome.  There won’t be a game next week for months to come, no 1:00pm gridiron sorbet to clear the pigskin palette of last week’s loss.  At best, those few glimmers of hope are 10 weeks off; the NFL Draft will signal a new season and bring us the names of new heroes and the dreams of yet another Super Bowl run will flicker through the long, hot nights of summer.

For me, there are just two stages of losing:

1.   Losing

2.   It Would Have Felt Better If They’d Won

Not to dismiss the passion, the emotional investment we make as fans with a shrug but our experience as fans is ephemeral; unless you like to hang out in NYC bars in your Patriots gear, it’s not going to leave a mark.  Win or lose, we’ll wake up tomorrow with the same problems we had at 6:29pm, February 5; the same mortgage, the same job, the same home repairs you’ve been putting off, bills to pay, the European debt crisis, whether or not Mitt Romney is a robot and should I really feel bad about the low wages and poor working conditions of the people who built my iPad?

Maybe the best thing we can do is embrace the obvious.  The 2011 season and Super Bowl XLVII are over.  Done and dusted. 

And I can hardly wait for the 2012 season.

My family says it's a sickness but I can't 

help myself; I'm fascinated by Youtube covers.