Fly Eagles, Fly

It’s not easy being a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. Born in Philadelphia, you don’t have much of a choice – you know how they say you can’t choose your family? Well, when you’re born in the shadows of Independence Hall, you can’t choose your football team, either. Yet the hard truth is this: forty four Super Bowl champions have been crowned in the NFL, and not once has that team hailed from Philadelphia. We’ve been close – agonizingly so – but close in the NFL is worth about as much as a cup of sand in the desert. We’ve been the butt end of jokes, the step-brother to sports’ golden children in New York City, the place where batteries and invectives freely fly. Underdog would be an understatement. 

It would be one thing if the Eagles were perpetually horrendous, if they were not the type to offer a glimpse of hope that, like a mirage on backcountry asphalt, is always one step ahead of where you are. But they aren’t; our birds have actually been one of the top three teams in the NFL over the past decade, in terms of regular season records. It’s been a decade of the “almost there” team, the “if we had one more play” team, the “why did he have to get injured now” team, and the "yard short and a minute late" team. Add that to history and you have two generations of football seasons that have ended in exactly the same spot - at the corner of Disappointment and Heartbreak. Babies have been born, men have died, wars started, wars ended, all without the Philadelphia Eagles ending a postseason with a win.  

But you don’t keep coming back for more, you don’t keep watching season after season, clad in midnight green and silver, without learning a thing or two along the way, or possibly going completely insane. Perhaps, just perhaps, not winning the Super Bowl has been a good thing. No, not because it will make it “that much sweeter” when and if we do (though it would), but because of what it might teach us about life itself.  

The Eagles have been an incredible team – best in the league, if you ask me – to watch and enjoy over the past decades. Watching Randall Cunningham play quarterback, you knew that you were witness to something so beautiful and ahead of its time that you and all the poets of the world lacked the vocabulary to adequately describe it. Somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, Randall is still scrambling, still mystifying coaches and defenders, still unleashing that majestic cannon of an arm and launching a perfect moon shot to an uncovered Fred Barnett, fifty-yards down field. Somewhere, the crowd still roars, and little boys still smile.   

Even in the dark days of Rich Kotite and Ray Rhodes, there were flickers of light. Then there was Donovan – underappreciated to this day – and an unprecedented era of great football in the city of Philadelphia. From 4^th and 26, to a 14-second play against the hated Cowboys, to a NFC Championship and a Super Bowl appearance, to throwing four touchdowns on a broken leg, Donovan gave us one hell of a good run – sometimes literally, always figuratively. And now, one season of Michael Vick, perhaps the first NFL quarterback to combine lightning quickness with being a lightning rod for controversy – a season again filled with the improbable (hanging 59 points on the Redskins) and the unbelievable (another Miracle at the Meadowlands).  

All that, and no Super Bowl. No, you don’t keep coming back to the Eagles because you have a need to root for a championship team (they call those people Yankee fans). We keep coming back because, for one, we all harbor that little seed inside us called hope – hope that one day things will be better, that one day we will be vindicated – but, more importantly, because we’ve come to realize that even though we haven’t won any of those oddly shaped silver trophies, we’ve had one hell of a fucking good time. As in life, you can spend all day, all week, all year, every year, waiting for that one glorious and transcendent moment of triumph that will make it all worthwhile, that one accomplishment upon which you can finally forever rest, or you can sit back and enjoy the ride, knowing that that one glorious moment, should it come, will pass in the same ephemeral fashion as all the rest. And that, in sum total, a handful of glorious moments relegated to the dusty shelves of memory, do not a lifetime of memories replace. Let’s not forgo enjoyment of the journey for the presumed gratification of the destination. Fly Eagles, fly.