"I should have known you'd bid me farewell / There's a lesson to be learned from this and I learned it very well / Now I know you're not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me / And I think it's gonna be all right / Yeah, the worst is over now / The mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball."
Some of you may recognize this mournful ode of farewell sung by the 60s band Cyrkle, or perhaps its remake that debuted in the comedy "Dodgeball." Even if you haven't heard it before, simply reading the lyrics should strike some nostalgic chords within your hearts: lost love, letting go, cathartic renewal, starting anew, etc. This is true for many of us. But those aren't the reasons that I decided to open this week's article with this excerpt. Instead, it was rather to set the melancholic mood for all New England Patriots fans?whether they like it or not?and to reflect back on their inclement evening that was.
I called my friend who goes to Duke on Monday afternoon roughly fourteen hours after his Patriots had lost Super Bowl XLII to the New York Giants 17-14. The first thing he said to me over the phone was, "I don't want to talk about the Super Bowl for the next three weeks."
I chuckled quietly to myself, having gained a small victory in watching New England lose, but sensed a genuinely depressed individual on the other end of the line. "That was the worst loss ever," he went on. "The last time I felt like this was in 2003 with Aaron Boone." It was odd, and seemed strangely anachronistic at the time, listening to a New England fan vent so dejectedly, so sorrowfully on his team's disappointing performance in a championship game.
But he wasn't finished: "You know what this is like? This is like when you're in love with a girl, and you have this awesome relationship and spend every waking moment with them and have the most wonderful time of your life with that person. You love them and they tell you they love you back and make all these promises that seem to good to be true, but you believe them anyway because she's who she is. Everything is perfect. And then you get down on one knee to propose and she says no. That's exactly what this is like." You know what? He wasn't far off.
What Patriots fans went through Sunday night was something that few had ever experienced. It was a loss in the Super Bowl. But it wasn't just that. Every Sunday leading up to this year's big game, Patriots fans would gather up their favorite snacks, reserve the most comfortable seats in the house, and set aside three and a half hours to watch the greatest show football had ever seen?all of this on a weekly basis. It was like watching "Oedipus Rex" in Ancient Greece, or watching the first performance of Mozart's "The Requiem" (I was at both, so I know).
After allegedly cheating against the Jets in Week One in the Spygate controversy, the Patriots went on to obliterate team after team after team with an eff-you mentality, while the rest of the league simultaneously took one giant gulp. But toward the end of the year, the merciless battering of teams stopped, and underdogs like the Eagles and Ravens nearly found a way to defeat the unbeaten men in red, white, and blue with below-average quarterbacks A.J. Feeley and Kyle Boller.
But still, New England kept winning. And finally, on the final game of the season in a normally meaningless match-up, the Patriots became the first team to ever go 16-0 in the regular season, slipping past the Giants 38-35, after Eli Manning gave Belichick & Co. their greatest scare of the season. They then knocked off Jacksonville and San Diego en route to a fourth trip to the Super Bowl in seven years. And while it may not have felt like the Patriots had dominated the entire regular season before reaching the Super Bowl, let me make one thing clear: Sunday's game was their FIRST LOSS OF THE SEASON! In other words, fans had become both intimately and romantically involved with this Patriots team more so than any other Patriots team, and probably more so than any team in NFL history, having invested so much time and emotion into this group of players from early August to late February. What Patriot fans felt on Sunday evening was a sense of outright betrayal.
The last time New England had lost in the Super Bowl, most fans on this campus were either too young to remember, or too young to root as ardently as they do now for the Pats, who lost to the Packers in 1996, and ironically had to go through Tom Coughlin (then head coach of the Jaguars) to get to the big game. Now, everyone from that generation has grown up, and has seen the very best, and arguably, the very worst, all rolled into the same season.
Just walking around campus the day after, I spoke with numerous Pats fans about the game that will leave an irremovable stain of acerbity on their lives as New England sports fans. And, to my chagrin, most of them felt as though the Patriots had lost the game, more than the Giants had actually won it. In hindsight, these persons do have a point.
Had Asante Samuel or Brandon Merriweather been able to catch a football, had Belichick brought out kicker Stephen Gostkowski to attempt a 48-yard field goal instead of going for it on fourth and thirteen with a bomb to Jabar Gaffney, or had the Patriots not abandoned their explosive offensive gameplan that had won them eighteen straight games, New England might have won.
But they didn't. And while the Patriots may have done a lot of things wrong, the Giants did a lot of things right: an unstoppable pass rush that made New England's offensive line look like a wall of Styrofoam, amazing poise by Eli Manning (do I need to remind you of the Miracle Play?), and more resiliency than I have ever seen from a team since, well, the 2001 Patriots. Simply put, the Patriots were both outcoached, and more importantly, outplayed by the New York Giants.
They were undefeated. Unbeaten. Unconquerable. 18-0, with all eyes fixed on the imminent prize. The Vince Lombardi trophy was theirs for the taking, riding on a perfect season with an ingenious coach and an immaculate quarterback holding the reins. Super Bowl XLII was supposed to be a historic night; one that would transcend athletic quintessence, and go down as the most incredible, most inconceivable achievements in sports that any of us had ever seen. But it didn't happen.
And now America's most-hated team will have to cope with the new charges of allegedly filming the Rams final walk-through before their first Super Bowl victory back in 2002 that may have helped them start their entire dynasty, not to mention dealing with a winter and spring full of nightmares from their final game of the season. Luckily however, there is the song that the team and their fans can find comfort in: "The story's in the past with nothin' to recall / I've got my life to live and I don't need you at all / The rollercoaster ride we took is (nearly) at an end / I bought my ticket with my tears, that's all I'm gonna spend / And I think it's gonna be all right / Yeah, the worst is over now / The mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball."
The Patriots and their fans? They'll be back, and they'll be fine. That is until that shining red rubber ball turns into that shining red sweatshirt Belichick was wearing as he stormed off the field, one second before it was over on Sunday, departing as he and his team had arrived, once again leaving all of us absolutely stunned.