Power rankings. Projected win totals. Division winners. Playoffs. Super Bowl LVI. Going way out on a limb to predict Patrick Mahomes will win MVP. Pigskin prognostications abound in the run up to the 2021 NFL season. Then Week 1 happens and as with all human endeavors, we are once again reminded that we don't know anything.
Maybe that's a good thing.
I know the fans of the teams west of the Connecticut River don't want to hear it but we all have our own pigskin burden to bear, even Patriots fans. For almost 20 years, that weight came in the form of expectations. Every year was Super Bowl or Bust. Every game was existential. I lost the vicarious joy of victory and instead gave myself over to the fear of losing. My team won 75% of their games, made it to the Super Bowl 9 times and won 6 and I'm not sure I enjoyed a minute of it. If the Patriots lost - and especially when they lost big - it was Man Bites Dog! Wall-to-wall coverage of the decline and fall of the Patriots Dynasty in real time, pigskin pundits and bobbleheads shoveling dirt onto the casket as fast as they could.
When the Patriots lost, I would go into a media blackout for a day following the game, sometimes two.
When they won, I wasn't filled with joy so much as relief. A win was the statistically expected outcome; it came without surprise or elation. At best, it shut up the haters for a week.
Okay, you can never shut up the haters.
But it was easier to take them.
Waiting for the hero to fall may not be unique to American culture but whether it's pop stars, movie stars, or great athletes and sports teams, Yankee Doodle Dandies seem to find a discomfiting level of joy in the hero's fall from grace. Maybe it's B-Movie logic: The "bad guy" has to get it as good as he gave it; pummeled to a bloody pulp, shot in the knees, and thrown off a tall building into a river full of crocodiles for his greed and cruelty. As a Patriots fan - and a movie buff - I always knew what would come after Tom Brady. And I know this: 2020 didn't wipe the slate clean for Buffalo Bills fans; they suffered for 20 long years and they want 20 years of payback.
Of course, Patriots fans felt the same way about the Bills back in the early 90s, when we were left with little more than schadenfreude as Buffalo would lose 4 straight Super Bowls.
No. I didn't have to go out of my way to mention that.
Yeah. We're all haters.
So. Here we are. 2021. This year's Patriots are a movie we've never seen, starring a young actor in his first major Hollywood production. I've seen the trailer but I've avoided reading what the critics have to say. A coming of age story? At least I hope it is, and not one of William Friedkin's nihilistic film noirs of the 70s. (Deep breath. Relax. It was the Patriots of the 2010s that felt like trucking nitroglycerin through the mountains of South America. This isn't that. And exhale.) Maybe Mac Jones is Daniel-san. (Good idea wearing that knee brace, kid. You know, in case someone tries to sweep the leg.) We only have a few more days until we start to find out and I can hardly wait.
No expectations. Hopes, perhaps, but no expectations. The losses will come with perspective and the wins will taste sweeter than they have since 2001.
Get me a big bag of Twizzlers. The movie's about to start.
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