There have been lots of benefits associated with the Patriots’ unprecedented run of superiority in the National Football League.
Some are obvious. We have crowned ourselves the “city of champions,” with six Super Bowl wins, four World Series championships and an NBA and NHL title each since the dawn of the 21st century. While it’s made us feel good in this little corner of the country, it’s made the rest of the United States sick. We are now the Yankees of football, having supplanted the Dallas Cowboys as the NFL team you most want to hate.
But it occurred to me after Saturday night’s loss to the Tennessee Titans in the Wild Card round of the playoffs that we’ll have to forego one of the most beneficial aspects of this long, glorious run of Patriot dominance: each year the Patriots went deep in the playoffs was another year we could tolerate January.
Face it. January is one brutal month. It’s cold, dark, stormy (and I don’t mean dark and stormy, which is something you may want to drink to get through January) and dull.
Not only is the weather wretched, but nothing of any real significance happens in January.
We’re left with massive post-holiday hangovers for the first couple of weeks. Even for those of us who can’t wait for all the festivities to cease, there is a void. Winter dawns with houses festooned with lights and other decorations, and they do a good job of distracting us from the misery we’re about to face for the next three months. Then, there are the holidays themselves.
Thus, we get a real boost just at the time when Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder is at its peak. It’s the darkest time of the year, and there’s plenty of light to help us through it.
But what happens after Christmas? The lights come off the houses and the bushes. The festive music stops. We’re focused on returning the clothes that don’t fit, or some other articles for which we have absolutely no use.
We’re steeped in negativity. We worry that it’s going to be too cold, too stormy, too slippery, and, in a lot of cases, too economically tight as we rein in the spending to compensate for the holiday spree.
But hah! For eight years running, that post-holiday malaise has been somewhat tempered by the Patriots. We could occupy ourselves with their concerns. From 2012 through to last year, the Patriots made the AFC final, which means they were still playing through the end of January. Five times in that span they made the Super Bowl, so our interest in them extended into February, keeping our focus away from how miserable it was outside.
Now what are we going to do? We have nothing to help us through these next 25 days, and to tell you the truth, there really isn’t anything else.
January is the meteorological opposite of August, except that at least in August you don’t have to put six layers of clothes on as you watch the weather forecast in horror over what calamity will strike.
But otherwise, where you have 31 days in August of nothing but unrelenting heat to look forward to, this month, there are 31 days of unrelenting, bone-chilling cold.
I’ll take August.
I remember the first time this occurred to me. It was 1986, and the Patriots were marching toward their first-ever Super Bowl. When it was over, and even though the Bears “Berry’d them,” it dawned on me afterward that “hey, January’s just about over.” These last 18 years have just made one of my least favorite months glide by, and weather notwithstanding, shortened my winter considerably in terms of my own misery index.
First, it’s New Year’s Day and the next thing you know it’s the last week in January and you’ve spent the entire time obsessing (or gloating, whatever floats your boat) about the Patriots.
I can be philosophical, and say that it’s been a great run — the type that, as a kid, I always read about in other places, whether it was Green Bay, New York, Montreal or wherever. As I grew up, the locales changed (San Francisco, Chicago and Miami, for example), but it was never here, except in the 1950s and ’60s with the Celtics (and again in the ’80s). But even then, those seasons ended in the (relative) warmth of spring,
But for the last 18 years we’ve been the Mecca of the NFL, and I’ll be parochial for a few minutes. It’s been great.
If it has ended, it has ended. So be it. We’ll all live. Being exposed to the harsh realities of January without anything else to keep us going is another matter, though.
But hey, cheer up. When January ends, there’s … February. No better, and often worse.
But at least there’s Valentine’s Day.
