From her home in bleak, beautiful New Hampshire, one of the hotbeds of Patriot fever, guest blogger Rebecca Lavoie describes what happens when a dream dies:
It never fails to amaze me how New England sports fans manage to take trash talking to a whole new level, whether we win or we lose. It's an art here, perhaps an offshoot of the front porch yarn-spinning we Yankees are known for, or perhaps a natural growth of the bitterness that has been fostered in us by years of unbridled athletic suckitude.
At the Super Bowl party I attended, the night started with the expected themes, the men pounding their chests over our championship certainty, the women gushing over "My Tommy" Brady, one even claiming that the QB was her children's real dad. (Interestingly, her husband looked a little relieved at the notion. Perhaps he was just wishing it was HE who'd gotten the close encounter...believe the YouTube vids, the Brady Mancrush is a real phenomenon here, turning our men into the kind of guys who notice when Tom gets a haircut, and say so out loud.) When the Giants took the field, we knew we had it sewn up, and we said so with salty gusto.
As things started going downhill, and we realized our lead was only four points at the half and not the twenty-four or so we'd come to expect, our quips turned to vitriol, with poor Eli Manning as our target. "Doesn't he know he's the lesser Manning?" we exclaimed, our insults gaining momentum as the camera kept panning to the far studlier Peyton in his luxury suite.
As the second half slogged on, we realized our Pats were in real trouble. As our assuredness that we were "in" Eli's head began to fade in to doubt, we focused our frustration into an even worse diatribe against the Giant's QB. "I wonder if Eli's mom ever told him he was a mistake," someone said, "doesn't he know how lucky he is she didn't find out about him until the second trimester?"
Ouch. Even to this bitter fan, that seemed a little harsh. (Well...not so harsh that I didn't laugh my ass off.)
Today, Pats 'shippers feel like we had a bad dream last night. What the fuck? Our perfect season ruined! Could it possibly be that our tirades worked against us karmically? Was it Belichick, and his ill-timed wardrobe change? Was it because Eli realized at last that being "lesser" doesn't have to mean being a "loser?"
I guess we'll never really know. But one thing you can count on is that we won't stop trash-talking about it, because that's what we do up here. And for now, that's what will have to sustain us. At least until the Red Sox start Spring Training.
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