I wanted the Patriots to win, but I also wanted to see a post-game interview where Bill Belichick’s team didn’t win the Super Bowl, mainly just to see his reaction.  Those are mutually exclusive events, so I opted more for the first outcome.  The game was filled with ups and downs, but mainly downs for the first two and a half quarters.  When the Patriots first scored a touchdown, I wasn’t exactly excited because 19 points still seemed like a long ways to go.  But then they scored again.  I was still doubtful, but then another touchdown came in.  It was getting to be crunch time in the fourth quarter, and by that point every play seemed to have me about out of my chair and clapping my hands.

I’m from Arizona, yet after definitively choosing my preferred team and seeing them comeback from such a large deficit, I felt like a Boston native, at least for a little while.  There’s some driving force behind “your” team winning a game, especially a championship that determines whether the team’s season will end in fruition or futility.

At the talk we had before the game, our conversation centered around advertisements and declining Super Bowl viewership.  A particular theory we came up with is that less people are watching because there are automatic score and play updates you can download on your cell phone.  After finishing the entire game, though, I thought of how much of a shame it would be to experience that win through text.  I guess I took a small slice of the victory from that team.  That slice seemed to blow up when I saw the excitement from the players, New England Natives, and anybody cheering on TV and around me in the Rose Dining Room.  For that night, this game with a binary outcome of win or lose put me in camaraderie with a bunch of other people whom I didn’t really know.  That seems to be the spirit of Super Bowl Sunday.