For some New England Patriots fans, Sunday night’s 28-24 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX must have felt like a replay of the end of the 2007 season. This time, for them if not the vast majority of football fans, however, there was a happy ending.
In Super Bowl XLII, the 18-0 New England Patriots were public enemy No1 thanks to SpyGate, the scandal where they were caught illegally videotaping opponents’ signs. Their attempt to answer their critics on the game’s biggest stage were undone when David Tyree’s improbable helmet catch turned a near-certain New England victory, and an unprecedented undefeated season, into an upset win for the New York Giants. It was an “us against the world” game for the Patriots where the world had the last laugh.
Fast forward to Sunday, with the Patriots taking the field after two solid weeks of accusations that the team had been using illegally deflated footballs. Again the Patriots clung on to a tiny lead in the game’s final minutes when disaster struck. On the Seattle Seahawks’ final drive of the game Jermaine Kearse somehow caught a deflected pass from quarterback Russell Wilson to set up a first and goal situation and the defending champions were yards away from sending the Patriots to their third Super Bowl loss in as many attempts. At that moment, with a game-winning Seattle touchdown almost inevitable, there wasn’t a single Patriots fan who didn’t immediately have vivid flashbacks to the Tyree catch.
Then, bizarrely, instead of trusting running back Marshawn Lynch to drive in what would certainly have been the game-winning touchdown, Wilson threw a pass on 2nd and goal that was intercepted by rookie Malcolm Butler. At that moment the 2007 script was turned on its head and this time the bad guys won.
In those two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, there was a school of thought among Patriots fans that DeflateGate would somehow put a damper on a potential win. Every true fan wants to believe that their team has been doing everything on the up and up, and there’s a very real possibility that head coach Bill Belichick or quarterback Tom Brady or someone in the Patriots locker room had been skirting the rules this entire time (even if a recent report suggests that the actual offense has been, ahem, overblown.)
Here in Boston at least, the specter of DeflatGate doesn’t seem to have diminished anything, at least not among the faithful. In fact, if last night’s cavalcade of callers to local sports talk stations are any indication, it seems to have made the win sweeter. When asked, “Do you think this Super Bowl win has the most meaning?” the WEEI host stuck broadcasting live circa 4am EST wasted no time in saying that it did.
A part of the reason this felt particularly meaningful was that this was another “us v the world” game for the Patriots, and by proxy their fans, who have felt like they’ve been unfairly scrutinized and vilified over the last few weeks. On the radio, in between debates about whether this win proved that Tom Brady is the best player in NFL history or merely the best quarterback in NFL history, callers again and again would chime in with variations on “screw the haters,” “we showed them” or “this should quiet them up.”
By “them,” they sometimes were referring to the NFL, or the national media, or other teams, or their fans… In essence, everyone except Patriots fans. It’s not exactly the most endearing sentiment, but it’s one forged by years of rival fans and media members dismissing their legacy as the by-product of pure chicanery, attacking their head coach for not being personable enough during press conferences and mocking their quarterback for being good looking and having a supermodel wife (these are apparently demerits in the football world).
At this point there’s no way to really be a fan of the second most hated NFL franchise without embracing one’s inner wrestling heel. If you’re going to be seen as the villain, you might as well enjoy it. The New York Yankees and their fans have been doing just the same for decades, although that’s probably not a comparison that Boston sports fans really would appreciate.
Now, there are drawbacks to being forced to play the heavy. the 2007 Patriots lost on one of the flukiest plays in Super Bowl history, they received no sympathy just oceans of schadenfreude. The upsides, however, can be sublime. In Arizona the 2014 Patriots didn’t just win; they pissed off the world while doing so. Here in Boston that’s known as a double victory.
