Year of the Patriots
A Providential win.

By Michael Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.
February 4, 2002 12:00 a.m.

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!"