giornata, 2/13/25

The Eagles won the Super Bowl

Giornata is my weekly media diary, a paid feature, coming out on Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week!

The Super Bowl, Chiefs-Eagles (22-40)

Before I moved to Philadelphia, I was mostly agnostic on football. My hometown baseball team played the Phillies enough that I could follow them regularly, but even just watching the Eagles on television consistently was substantially harder living just outside of Atlanta. The Eagles were not always on national broadcasts and the AFC South Falcons are never guaranteed to play NFC East Eagles in any given season.

But then the Birds went on a Super Bowl my first season here. It is hard to express how much the city’s mood is dependent on the Eagles during football season. When I lecture on secondary sources for my legal research class, I solemnly open with “Today, we starting with a secondary source that hopefully is more relevant than not during your time as Pennsylvania attorneys.” And then proceed to show them a tweet from Tom Bro Dude, a beloved late Philadelphia area sports fan that reads “Eagles won so you know what that means… No laws in Philadelphia for the next week.” It generally gets a few laughs, but I think it is funny, so I keep doing it.

But the first season, I was still getting my community legs in the city. Now two years later, nearly everyone I know is a huge Eagles fan. The heightened mood of the city wasn’t something I was experiencing through the miasma of hysterics and Kelly green outfits, but texts I was sending and conversations I was having with friends.

I’ve written before about the romance of sports. But an angle that I hadn’t even really experienced yet with Philadelphia sports was the romance of the Philadelphia part. I think up until this Eagles season, where I had gotten this feeling the most was attending the Philadelphia Orchestra, widely considered one of the best in the country. The collective mass of people, most of whom live in this city, watching people do something so good that it seems inhuman. It’s like Sally Rooney’s quote that I cited after the NFC Championship win, “For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small,” though at the time I was thinking about Saquon Barkley.

But it is also like the end of Meet Me in St. Louis:

Rose: We don’t have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel. It’s right in our own hometown.

Esther: I can’t believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.

And those Eagles are ours. I didn’t think growing up as a Philadelphia fan across the country that I missed that feeling—I thought the delight of being contrarian outweighed any community drive that I had. But since 2020 and as I have gotten older, I appreciate the romance in a large group of people looking in the same direction at a miracle. Seeing Jalen Hurts throw the football 46 yards to his former Alabama teammate DeVonta Smith, especially when commentators and haters have for years doubted Hurts’ ability to throw the ball felt like a miracle. We’d been relying on Saquon’s virtuoso run game all playoffs (and for a lot of the regular season), but the touchdown that effectively, if not literally, finishes the game is a throw that sails. All touchdowns are six points in football, be they tush pushes or punt returns. But a nearly fifty-yard throw when your receiver beats his man? That’s a grand slam, that’s a floater for a buzzer-beater, that’s a screamer, that’s romance.