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Super memories:
how sports bring us together
By Emma Tocci
Collegian Reporter
I wrote this on
February 3, 2002-my freshman year, just after the Patriots and
I won our first Super Bowl. Sometimes caring at all about the
media-bloated event seems a concession to the morally crude
"brawn, beer, and babes" mentality. Then sometimes
you just want to win.
Winning the Super Bowl never mattered so much.
But since leaving my comfortably cultured Boston suburb for
college in remote Michigan, it does.
Sometimes I feel the distance more acutely.
Landlocked in this sea of Midwesterners, I am in the minority
being one who has never had sauerkraut or bratwurst, nor a Sunday
dinner comprised of multiple casseroles. I have never seen a
tractor pull, nor a chainsaw-carving contest. I have never spent
Saturday nights exploring Walmart.
This past August-the beginning of freshman
year-was when I felt the greatest disorientation. A girl on
my intramural football team had never heard of MIT ("Is
it in Michigan?" she asked). Or how about when a group
of us drove an hour and a half to find an ice cream place and
passed a convenience mart with a sign advertising "Pop,
sandwiches, deer processing."
So gradually I am identifying myself more
and more with the East, with New England, and most especially
with Boston. The last place I expected this regionalism to manifest
was in pro sports; but it has, and I am glad.
I confess to being a fair weather fan. As
a seasoned critic, I never rooted publicly for the Sox, the
Pats or the Celts-not for long anyway. I learned early that
to do so meant vulnerability to an abundance of scathing criticism
from the same people who ought to have been cheering alongside.
It seemed to me that most New Englanders believed
team spirit was merely blind optimism and an invitation for
disappointment.
In January, however, I discovered the Patriots'
good fortune and was hopeful. I remembered coming home after
church on Sundays when everybody piled onto my parents' bed
to eat pizza and watch the game. I remembered my dad and the
boys pounding the floor in disgust or glee.
Sitting with the game in the empty lobby of
my dorm, I remembered all this and readily latched on to the
piece of home, grabbing hold of blind optimism.
So far this semester Sundays have been spent
in conferences with Dad discussing general prospects, complications,
strategies and team politics. During the game we fret out our
anxieties, coax our team to greatness, and whoop in celebration.
On the night of the Super Bowl, I called them
again-I was in the student union, they were in Children's Hospital.
My teenage brother was just getting out of surgery after breaking
his femur clear in half in a snowboarding accident.
Across state lines, across culture lines, we were on the same
wavelength, pulled by the same tensions, hoping for the same
win.
As the time whittled down to mere seconds,
I crouched on the couch, pleading for a victory.
"C'mon Adam baby. Awww you got it, c'mon now, you got it…"
As the field goal flew through the posts I
roared, dancing with the sundry group of New England fans-one
from New Hampshire, someone who once lived in Rhode Island,
and even a Vermonter. Yes! We Won.
I fell, floated, flew down the hill to my
dorm slapping the hands of acquaintances passing by.
"Happy, Emma?" they asked knowingly
(go ahead, complain about the small school but sometimes you
wanna go where everybody knows your name).
Yes, I am happy.
And I am happier because I know my family
is. I can see the pizza boxes piled on Tim's hospital bed, as
they stomp on the floor in triumph.
Maybe some things never change.
The Patriots still win by a field goal,
and we still revel in their red, white and blue confetti celebration
with floor stomping. But other things do change.
Now I've had bratwurst and I've even seen
a chainsaw-carving competition. Now when I call home only one
brother is there, sick with mono, and everyone else is out watching
the game with friends.
I like to think that growing up and growing
out, we shoot off on our own before coming back and being together.
I guess I don't worry because I know family does come back,
and until we're actually piled on the same bed, we can be united
by the confidence that our prayers buoyed that football through
the field goal posts with four seconds left.
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