Damien Galeone

I don’t sleep well anymore. I get overheated easily and I now share my bed with a dog who has found the most comfortable bed in the whole house is between my legs. What physical discomfort can’t do to keep me awake is taken up by my brain. Right when it’s time to shut off for the night, I list the next day’s work, think about someone I wronged in the third grade, or wonder how many frogs are in North America.

Sunday night, along with making mental notes to email Kate Breslin and look up frog census numbers on Wikipedia, there’s also a football game. In fact, it’s the Superbowl. Now I’m not going to pretend to be a diehard football fan, but I do love my Eagles in a lateral I-live-across-the-world kind of way.

I’d gladly watch football every Sunday, a thing I did more or less religiously when I lived in the U.S. if for no other reason than that’s what all my friends were doing. But football for me is now on at 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock. Nevertheless, when I get a chance, I watch the Eagles play just like I sometimes rouse at 1 am during the spring and watch the Phillies play.

However, I noted an interesting detail this last year – when I did not watch the Philadelphia Eagles play football, they won. When I watched them, they lost. This clear case of post hoc ergo propter hoc is unavoidable to any Philly sport fan. Like many sports fans, Philly sports fans are absurdly superstitious. If the Eagles win when you shave and lose when you don’t, you shave. If the Flyers win when you popo twice in the morning and lose when you poop once, you take an extra one for the team. And you keep doing these things until the experiment proves incorrect. Now, science, the laws of probability, enough academic study to fill a stadium, and the logic of the universe tells us all that we – as fans – do not in any way influence professional sporting games. Except we Philly fans totally influence games. So, because I love my hometown, I stopped watching the Eagles in October and would only follow along on ESPN’s live game updates. It is very clear to me that this Superbowl victory is due to my heroic self-neglect.    

My personal damage to Philly sports aside, one thing I do miss living abroad is watching sports. Sure, I can tune in to a Phillies game or an Eagles game. And as long as I can get the game, who cares about the environment I watch it in. I more or less recreate an American living room in my house, after all.

But it’s not the same. What, after all, can make up for a Sunday afternoon football game with bad seasonal commercials to take up the space during a half’s 26 timeouts. Hoagies and beers, the community shouts coming from the houses on your street. The pizza guy asking if the kicker shanked the field goal and getting a full descriptive playback. Same with baseball. I can listen to or watch a game in July. But if the neighbors don’t understand why I’m shouting ‘swing the fucking bat’, then it’s just not the same. Nor is the same as when your city’s team is in the Superbowl and the whole city wordlessly agrees to give each other a hall pass the next day.   

As I awoke this morning, the first thing I noted was the profound lack of messages. Nothing from Facebook. Not a slurred congrats from my brother, not a message from my mom followed by roughly 700 emoticons and 400 exclamation points. Nothing. My heart lurched. Surely this meant that things had gone south. Last I checked we were up by 17. And either coming back and winning from a 17-point deficit was almost as peculiarly Philadelphia as blowing a 17-point lead. I gritted my teeth.

My fears were alleviated moments later. We had won it. Amazingly, we had blown them out. My brother sent me a picture of him and our friends wearing boozy red faces. I am sad to have not been involved, but enormously happy. So happy, in fact, that I have given myself a hall pass for tomorrow. I’ll go to a bar tonight and cheers them on: Fly Eagles Fly!