WARNING: In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m writing about sports this week.
By the time you read this, we’ll know who this year’s representatives are in the Super Bowl to be played on Sunday, Feb. 12.
As I’m writing this on January 25, 2023, football, especially a past Super Bowl, is on my mind.
If you’re a Packer fan like me, someone whose blood has measurable traces of green and gold coloring in it, you know the date of January 25. It was a painful day to be a fan.
Wisconsin sports fans have been suffering through the mixed blessings of many heartbreaks over the past 25 years. I say they are mixed blessings because the alternative is to not even be in a position to be hurt at all and just trudge through years of mediocrity and failure.
What’s so special about January 25? The Packers lost Super Bowl XXXII to the Denver Broncos 31-24.
If I am any judge of the readership out there, my guess is that I’m getting about 30 percent head nods, 40 percent eye rolls, 20 percent blank stares, and 10 percent smiling “I just love reading the Catholic Herald cover-to-cover” right about now (thank you by the way).
So why oh why, 25 years after the fact, am I still dwelling on a football game that took place in San Diego? I learned a lot from it.
It’s not hyperbole at all to say that said game was an important part of my growing up, occurring when I was a mere 14 years old.
‘So what did we learn?’
On that night in 1998, sitting in my parents’ living room in utter and stunned disbelief, I learned that losing is a lot easier to accept than winning.
The Packers’ 35-21 Super Bowl XXXI win over the pre-Tom Brady New England Patriots took a long time to sink in.
The year after’s result was apparent and real right away. I had to accept that my team had lost not only the game, but also their conference’s 13-game Super Bowl win streak, the Packers’ undefeated in Super Bowls mark, and a chance at another Lombardi-years-esque dynasty.
A game that all of the experts said they should have won (a local sports radio show had said Green Bay’s 23-10 conference title game win over the San Francisco 49ers was the “real” Super Bowl and not a very good one, thus dismissing the game against the Broncos as an after-thought) didn’t go as it “should” have.
I had to learn and accept that sometimes my team loses. Sometimes things don’t go my way even though they should. Sometimes I have to accept there isn’t always a happy ending.
This is a rotten reality check to give to anyone who’s just starting to “grow up,” but I had to learn it.
It was something that carried me and dragged with me through the next years of my life.
I know it was only a football game, but I had to learn sometime, right?
What followed in the next of couple years was an obsession to right the wrong that happened on January 25, 1998.
What followed was a team always falling short, sometimes in painful ways.
Thirteen years later, the Packers lifted the Lombardi Trophy once again as champions, but that didn’t fully heal the fact that life hurts sometimes.
Maybe it’s OK that a football game began to teach me that lesson and not something more tragic.
Looking back and reflecting
It still hurts. Not necessarily the game itself, but the reality of life after it.
When you suffer enough losses in life, it’s easy to say “Why bother? Antonio Freeman won’t catch the pass on second down, anyway.” — Metaphorically speaking of course.
As I’ve been thinking about this game again, I can’t help but laugh at myself a little bit for how naive I was.
Green Bay eventually was going to finish a season short of their goal. Even had they won Super Bowl XXXII, would I have been just as hurt over them losing Super Bowl XXXIII and not winning three in a row or not even getting there again?
We all had to learn sometime. We don’t always win.
Finding that out for the first time is never easy.
Our challenge is to be OK with the fact that we’re not always going to win our Super Bowls. We’re not always going to win every game put in front of us every day.
Are we good with that or will we feel like failures if we fall short of either our goals or the goals others had set for us?
No one gets through this life undefeated (ugh, really Kevin?), and not everyone can be a champion, but we can be the best us and still have a fine “career” to look back on.
Oh, and don’t forget to celebrate those moments (humbly) when wins do happen of a great magnitude.
Some of those accomplishments are well-earned.
What are the Super Bowl rings in your life that you can be proud of?
I have a simple gold one on my left hand that’s pretty neat.
Also, what are the Super Bowl losses in your life that you can live with, accept, and be better because of them?
It’s OK if they still hurt you. Pain is always going to hurt. I hope that you got through it, are getting through it somehow, or are seeking ways to get through it.
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.