Super Bowl Fallout: First Boston Collapse in a Generation

ear’s AFC championship game, more than the Red Sox 2005 ALDS series against the White Sox, and only slightly more than the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees.

Unlike baseball where it’s next to impossible to not miss a single pitch of an entire season, football you can sit down and watch the entirety of your favorite team’s season: a sport where each game counts the same in the standings as ten regular season baseball games. After going an entire regular season and two playoff games of that without seeing your team get tripped up once, you cannot rationalize how any team will beat them until it happens.

It happened. The-team-that-could-not-lose lost, and I’m not sure where to turn for solace.

The sports-hangover I woke up with Monday morning is the first of its kind in my lifetime and I’m sure the first of many I will experience as long as I continue to eat, breathe, and live Boston sports.

As I got out of bed this morning bleary-eyed and simply not ready to face the world as we know it on February 4, 2008, my dad was at the breakfast table reading a paper and watching local news anchors (aggravatingly) tried to sugar-coat the enormity of the loss the Patriots just endured.

He, unlike I, was able to watch the news and muster a smile towards my mother who, through 26 years of marriage, has come to understand and accept the silence that resonates throughout our house the following morning after tough losses.

So there my father sits, a few more grey hairs, maybe a tiny wrinkle now exists where there was not one before—but overall, no worse for the wear. Protected by over forty years of letdown by his beloved teams, he is able to wake up this morning and draw upon many other mornings just like this one to get through the day ahead.

So here I sit, struggling to put my thoughts on paper, envious of my father’s ability to cope with losses like this, and unsure of how to deal with the day ahead and the many Giants fans who will surely not let me forget of the previous night’s events.

The only thing you can do in times like these, is try to be gracious towards any Giants fans who brag about their win and try to keep looking forward because there’s no sense dwelling on the past; as hard as that will be to achieve.

I need to find something, anything, to keep me going on a day like this.

Fortunately…

12 days until Red Sox pitchers and catchers report. 

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