ONE UNIFYING CAUSE: SWEET REVENGE
Deflategate anger brings fans together
HOUSTON — Nobody who owns, coaches, plays on or roots for the Patriots will ever admit this, but there has been a silver lining to Deflategate.
Slow down, slow down . . . I’m not calling Deflategate a “good” thing, or a blessing in disguise or a gift from the National
Football League Death Star. Slow down.
I’m simply saying there’s a silver lining, which is described by urbandictionary. com as a “phrase used to tell someone that there is a brighter side to the problem they are facing.”
The problem facing the Patriots and their followers throughout this season has been that the whole lot of ’em are still cranky and irritable over the Deflategate fallout — the $1 million fine, the lost draft picks and, especially, the four-game suspension that cracked the bow of the USS Tom Brady.
But this has been the brighter side of the problem as well: Everyone is cranky and irritable.
Because of Deflategate, this entire season has been transformed into a mission for Pats fans. Tonight’s Super Bowl LI showdown between the Patriots and Atlanta Falcons at NRG Stadium is being seen by the rest of the world as, you know, The Big Game, but for New Englanders it is a day to settle all family business.
Today’s game is the finish line to a cause, the end of a mission, the completion of a glorious undertaking.
Today is the day Roger Goodell gets a heapin’ helpin’ of Deflategate Revenge, especially when the 60 minutes of football are over and then, for 60 agonizing seconds, Mr. I’ll Be Very Happy to Come to Gillette Stadium As Soon As Mr. Kraft Invites Me flashes the cheesiest, blip-eating grin of all time as he hands over the MVP trophy to Brady.
We have long accepted the understanding that Brady will be the perfect little lad as he accepts that trophy, that he’ll be all warmth and bows and firm handshakes. But it won’t be about the handshake. And it won’t be about a snarky comment from Brady, for it ain’t gonna happen. It’ll be about that cheesy, blip-eating grin from the commish; entire documentaries will be devoted to it. (I’m actually serious about that.)
Yes, the Pats could lose, of course, and then everyone beyond the wall outside Patriot Nation (Donald Trump got the Krafts a discount on the building materials) will direct a nice, big har-har-hardee-har-har up this way. Except that nobody wearing a Gronk shirt sees is that way. The New England masses are fired up as perhaps never before — and that, people, is the silver lining.
I lack access to the books in the Gillette Stadium counting room, so I can’t tell you that the Pats had been getting what they call “soft sellouts” in recent years. What I can tell you, if only anecdotally, is that I kept running into people who were more or less
assuming the Pats would win every year, and in that spirit they had grown a little soft around the middle.
Deflategate is like that 30/10 Weight Loss for Life program they talk about on the radio in that it “incorporates a mind-body approach to weight loss, encouraging new habits and behavior.”
The new habits for Pats fans this season are that they haven’t been lallygagging at the concessions stands during halftime, swigging brewskis and downing hot dogs instead of being on hand to cheer the Pats when they take the field for the third quarter. They haven’t been “gifting” their preseason tickets to the letter carrier. They haven’t been missing Patriots Monday, or New England Tailgate or any of the other 9,347 weekly radio or television programs that are all Pats, all the time.
Pats fans have never been this angry. Yes, there was the fallout over Ben Dreith’s roughing-the-passer call on Sugar Bear Hamilton in the 1976 playoff game between the Patriots and Oakland Raiders, which absolutely remains one of the biggest bag jobs in sports history. And, yes, a lot of people were upset when Bill Parcells was too busy lining up a new coaching job with the New York Jets to adequately prepare the Patriots to face the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXI.
But, sorry, is just wasn’t the same back then. The Pats were still something of a curiosity in the 1970s. And while Robert Kraft, Drew Bledsoe and Parcells are the three men most responsible for the building of Gillette Stadium, the Pats of the late 20th century didn’t grip New England as do today’s Pats.
And today, tonight, the seas will be angry, my friends.
Deflategate did that.