|
 his
one was for John Adams — and for Sam Adams, too.
My daughter
Jana explained it before the game. "Dad," she said, "this
year it's only fitting that a team called the Patriots should win.
After what we've experienced the last year, it's Providential. The
year of the Patriots. Watch," she said, "Providence will
do it. Has to."
The clue came
when the Patriots refused to be introduced one-by-one, coming through
the tunnel, breaking with the custom. They wanted to be introduced
as a team, all at once, together.
A starker difference
between John Adams's Massachusetts and T. Jefferson's Virginia could
hardly have been dramatized. The Massachusetts experiment in religious
liberty stressed the need to protect the moral sense of the community,
so that liberty might survive. Virginia stressed the individual
conscience, with comparatively little provision for the moral sense
of the community. (See chapter three of On
Two Wings.)
The day after
02/02/02, the New England Patriots put together a game plan worthy
of the surprise at Bunker Hill. Overnight, they had fortified the
formerly unoccupied hill in total silence, and dug in defenses that
their adversary (whose battle emblem was the British ram) hadn't
seen or expected. The Patriots were content to bend, to give, to
seem to hold their fire and then let loose in concentrated bursts.
Three times they broke the advance of the oncoming ranks with swift
and brilliant turnovers. Just before the end, their ammunition running
low, their own ranks could no longer hold and they began to look
cold retreat directly in the eye. And then they rallied for a final
volley.
They showed
their grit with only 1:30 left.
They had been
leading 17-3 past the third-quarter mark and for more than six minutes
into the final period, when suddenly the more heavily armed Rams
exploded upon them like cannon shot, and scored two explosive touchdowns
within a burst of hardly more than seven furious minutes. Angered,
knowing they had superior firepower, the invading adversary began
to smell its customary comeback victory.
It felt as
though the Patriots might have to fold. But they didn't. The score
suddenly tied 17-17, they were stopped cold at the kickoff, on their
own fifteen. Up the field they marched, little by little, not cautiously
but giving everything they had. They slogged ahead with perfect
passes (they had no timeouts) for 47 yards. With only seven seconds
left, they managed to get a timeout by grounding the ball at the
Rams 35. The place kick from there, indoors, no wind, the score
knotted at 17-17 before the ball took flight, was marked "team
of destiny."
In John Adams's
day, they called it Providence. They even named a New England city
for it.
What a great
city for a Super Bowl New Orleans is. A real touch of Old Europe
— Catholic, baroque Spain, and France. Just the right blend
of wonderful food and the faint moldy aroma of corruption and naked
decadence.
Like the young
women, innocent of face as Iowa or Missouri, on a balcony on Bourbon
Street on Saturday, not two blocks from St. Louis cathedral, beckoning
to the boys in the street below to throw high their Mardi Gras beads
for the girls to catch. Then, when sufficiently rewarded, the blushing
girls pulled up their black sweaters to their chins, to flash their
bodies from pant top to neck for several seconds, evoking roars
of gleeful cheers and whistles from below.
Down the street
aways, one passes antique stores, palm readers, tarot-card readers,
crystal-rock readers, restaurants, bars, Haagen-Dazs berry-berry
yogurt ices, pizza, Blue Bell ice-cream carts. The smell of beer
and stomach heaves gathers in the littered gutters at the curb,
below the clickety-clack of brilliant young tap-dancers on the narrow
sidewalks.
There was a
wedding in St. Louis Cathedral on the quiet, lovely, flowered Jackson
Square, surrounding the bellicose General in bronze, or rearing
horseback. Outside the Cathedral door street theater talked the
surrounding circles of pedestrians out of dollars into passing hats.
At four Saturday
afternoon, there was an under-thirty-minute mass at the Jesuit church
on Baronne Street (where Don Shula ducked in with all the other
pilgrims and locals).
New Orleans
is a treat for the senses and the soul. It needs a Herman Melville
to catch its mists and moods.
We won't often
see a better football game than we saw on February 3, the feast
of St. Blaise, patron saint of protection of the throat, the feast
of "the blessing of the throats" (displaced to Saturday
evening by the Sunday precedence. Did the Patriots have their throats
blessed? They didn't choke. And neither did the Rams, who just got
beat).
Football is
designed for destiny and chance. That's why the ball is shaped the
way it is, for funny bounces. When Lady Fortune blows into the other
team's sails, the windless team is suddenly bereft of all its seeming
strength, no matter how valiantly it fights.
What brilliant
coaching was in evidence, in beautifully designed offensive plays
and defensive schemes on both sides. The smile of Fortune, though,
was on New England, as the final score revealed. They were not the
better team, just as their namesakes of 1776 were not the stronger
army.
They may have
showed more grit and not a little fiercer faith than the other side.
They were willing to bend a lot, to yield, but not to break —
except for that onslaught in the final minutes, in which the Rams
had stunned them with a rapid 14 points.
This year's
Patriots then found it in themselves to pick themselves up off the
stadium floor, eke out a first down here, another there, and somehow
find themselves staring at the yellow goal posts with a whole seven
seconds left, for that final swing of the toe into leather. And
then collapse in hardly believing joy, as it sailed comfortably
between the uprights, and into history books.
My daughter
Jana smiled to me just then, with that superior smile that women
so successfully affect. "Told you so!"
|
