No one likes us, we don’t care

This week has been, admittedly, pretty electric in Philly. In case you truly don’t pay attention to current events, the Eagle won the Super Bowl and people take that to be a Very Big Thing™ around here. Within a few minutes of the game being over hundreds of thousands of people had already clogged Broad St. and were marching towards City Hall. No idea what their plan was from that point. We’ve since had a parade and everyone is way happier than normal.

Now listen I am not big on the pigskin. In fact, I had purposefully boycotted the entire season and didn’t watch a single down. I don’t watch much football to begin with, but this season I made a point not to watch even if it was on around me. Between the systemic racism and total disregard for the health and wellness of players (not just the reckless disregard for the severity of concussions) I just can’t in good conscience contribute to it.

But, god damnit, sometimes your principled stand runs right into what is, whether you like it or not, a major social and historical event for a city. So I caved and watched the last two games.

You could write a dissertation on all the interesting things going on with something like this, but here’s what I really liked.

Listening to the analysts and commentators it was absolutely painfully clear that they neither expected Philadelphia to win but they didn’t even want them to win. Every possible opportunity to lean towards the Patriots in analysis and commentary was taken. At the end they were literally talking about what they’d “hope for” so that Tom Brady could pull off the comeback win.

And the Eagle simply did not give a fuck.

In a hilarious and impassioned rant, the Eagles’ center explained the team’s attitude towards all of the talking heads that dismissed them all season long.

And he closed it out with a rousing rendition of the famous “No one likes us, we don’t care​” football hooligan chant.

Here’s the thing. In probably the majority of cases where you are doing something fantastic people are going to expect you to fail, and they’re not even going to be disappointed when you do. If even a single guy on that field had decided late in the fourth quarter that he was just really tired and you know what, the Patriots really just are the better team and there’s no sense in continuing to push forward no one would have blamed him at all. The analysts would have talked about the Eagles’ improbable run that ended exactly as everyone expected it to.

But these guys decided they were going to ram through the dip with every bit of everything they had, talking heads be damned.

And look how that turned out.

You know it’s like I said the other day, you have to know when to quit and when to keep going.

But if you’re going to keep going, you better keep going no matter what anybody else says.

Nobody likes us?

It’s ok.

We don’t care.