The problem, of course, is that the first reaction New England will have to this will be to shake its fists defiantly at the rest of us, tell us all to go straight to hell. They are prideful and parochial and proudly petulant in that six-state corridor, don’t much like it when those of us on the outside line up against them.
Which is a shame.
Because there is little question that for that segment of America and the world whose rooting interests aren’t tied exclusively to the spread (where much of the early money has been dropped on the Patriots, giving three points), the Atlanta Falcons are about to become something that nobody would ever have guessed the Atlanta Falcons could ever be.
America’s Team.
(At least temporarily.)
And, see, the good folks of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire, they will want to take this the wrong way at first because, hey, wouldn’t you be hacked off if someone suggested the whole world was lined up against you? Patriots fans are paranoid in their happiest moments; when dark clouds hover, they’re slightly less bright-eyed than Oliver Stone.
So let’s get one thing straight, OK?
Declaring the Falcons America’s Team (for the moment) is the highest compliment anyone could possibly pay your football team.
(Interestingly this wouldn’t be the first time an Atlanta team has aspired to be “America’s Team.” Back in the ’80s, WTBS blatantly stole the nickname from the Cowboys — who somehow had failed to trademark it — and began declaring the Braves to be America’s Team, which officially became comical around 1988 or so, when the Braves lost 106 games.)
Sports fans don’t randomly hate on just anyone. There’s little point in wasting time rooting for a team to lose, when you expend so much energy, prayer, devotion and intensity – most often fruitlessly – in hoping your own favorite teams win. You have to achieve a certain otherworldly level of – well, achievement – in order to warrant a full-court press of fury.
You have to be the Yankees, for instance, who have won 27 World Series and 40 pennants and appeared in 52 postseasons going back to 1921, who have dominated baseball in a way no other team has dominated any sport.
Who, as early as July 1927, inspired the Chicago Daily Tribune to opine: “The well wishers would have the league break up the Yankee combination and distribute the strength among the weak clubs” and as late as October 2001 inspired Curt Schilling to insist, when asked about qualities that allegedly made the Yankees unbeatable: “Mystique and Aura, those are dancers in a nightclub, not things we concern ourselves with on the ball field.”
You have to be the UCLA Bruins of John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, who won 10 NCAA basketball championships in the 12 seasons connecting 1964 and 1975 – including eight in a row – who so obsessed rival teams like Notre Dame that the Irish would spend weeks fantasizing about what it would be like to beat them.
“We’d have a practice a few days before, and I’d call the team together and say, ‘OK, when we win on Saturday, [Gary] Novak, you make sure you get the basketball so we have it for the trophy case, and [John] Shumate, you make sure you find the scissors so we can cut the net down,’” Digger Phelps recalled gleefully a few months ago. “And we’d practice that.”
And even the school’s priests would buy in.
“This is not just an ordinary day,” Father Edmund Joyce said in his homily the morning Notre Dame ended UCLA’s 88-game winning streak in 1974. “The chances are good that years from now you will look back on this day as one of the most memorable in your life. Is this melodramatic? I don’t think so.”
(This is all thoroughly ironic, given how many folks have ganged up and cheered for bad things to befall Notre Dame football through the years, making 2016 among the greatest years of all in the Bizarro Fighting Irish Parallel Universe.)
So, yes, rage if you must, New England, but we are a nation that for the next two weeks will dredge up the old Dirty Bird dance, will dust off our old Steve Bartkowski jerseys, will figure out a way to leave a pair of tickets at the box office the way Jerry Glanville used to. Who will RISE UP and hope to give flight to the Falcon. Nothing personal, you see. We’re just tired of you.
Which is anther way of saying: We’re jealous as hell.