Into The Mythic

Once upon a time, Bill Belichick buried a football.

In yesterday's practice, Tom Brady punted a football into the crowd.

We're all subject to the objective correlative.

No, I'm not trying to say Tom Brady's temper tantrum (if you prefer) is a season defining inflection point (unlike Belichick's entombment of a symbolic orb). It is, though, ritualistic and deeply satisfying to the amygdala. It symbolically banishes the bad thing. The poorly played game. The poorly thrown pass. The shaman cleanses everyone's mental palette. The tribe is reassured. These primeval frameworks persist to this day. After Brady punted that football into the crowd every player on the Patriots heaved a mental sigh of relief. A beat that encompassed an ending and a beginning. It was just a moment in one sense, I suppose. Comic relief, perhaps? Whatever label you place on it, it was still an important (if small and context-specific in the big picture sense) moment.

These are the moments a team is being built. It's that scene in the movie where the misfits come together. It's that moment the boys are getting their asses handed to them in a fruit basket and it looks bleak but suddenly there's that one moment where one of your boys does something - scores an improbable touchdown to make the score 49-6 (you didn't get shut out!) or absolutely levels that great, great grandson of the master race playing QB for the other team (yeah, I played the Nazi card… my bad, obviously. Where was I?).

It's the emotional equivalent of the boys dancing to "I Will Survive" in a jail cell in "The Replacements."  

Gene Hackman is good in everything. (I dare you.)

The all time greats have a charismatic, if not messianic, component. They're leaders in a obsessive, Ahab invoking a blood ritual kind of way. Tom Brady is not done. His eyes are lasers, still focused and ruining the furniture at home on a daily basis. Lightning arcs from his fingertips. (Don't try that at home.) Confronted with a clearly evil, possessed (yet perfectly inflated) football, Young Odin punts that sucker into the ether and inconsequence. All is well now. The prince has shaken off his ill humor. Restored in our manly vigor, let's now get in our boats, sail to strange lands, and pillage the lands of the indigenous peoples there!

That's really just football in a nutshell, isn't it?