The Super Bowl is one of the highlights of my year. Even when the Steelers aren’t participating, I revel in the rush. Sometimes not having your team in play can make you appreciate the game more than the score.
I have been up front about my absolute loathing of the Philadelphia Eagles. I couldn’t hate them more if the team was fully composed of spiders and rabid bats. So this year should have been easy for me, right? I should have wanted Kansas City to win.
But I had to recognize a wrench in my hatred. That wrench is named Saquon Barkley. Saquon went to Penn State and when I covered the university, he was one of those special student athletes. He was a genuinely nice guy who did genuinely nice things. If every college athlete acted like Saquon Barkley, colleges would be better places.
And this year, he moved from the New York Giants to the Philadelphia Eagles. Not gonna lie. It hurt. Then they went to the Super Bowl, and I had an existential crisis.
How do I root for Saquon to win — but the Eagles to lose? The answer, of course, is that I couldn’t. I had to accept that what was good for the guy I liked was, unfortunately, good for a team I hate. I had to accept that my life would go on if that happened. The Eagles have won games before and I lived. They even won a Super Bowl before — just one — and I didn’t die on the spot. It would be fine.
And that’s what happened. The Eagles played a hell of a game, scoring a well-deserved win, and Saquon Barkley will get a Super Bowl ring. If the Eagles getting a Lombardi trophy still stings a bit, I can focus on the positives.
There is a political lesson there — especially this week.
For more than three years, I have brought Marc Fogel’s name up in this column, in editorials and in an interview I did with him from the Russian prison where he was sentenced to spend 14 years for possession of 17 grams of medical marijuana legally dispensed in Pennsylvania.
I have admonished the State Department to make him part of negotiations and begged Joe Biden to say his name. I advocated for him to be deemed wrongfully detained, which we were finally able to report in December had occurred sometime earlier.
On Tuesday, Fogel was a free man. President Donald Trump, who had promised Fogel’s mother, Malphine, 95, that he would bring her son back to her, delivered. Fogel, holding an Iron City beer in one hand and with an American flag draped around his neck, met with the president at the White House.
If people support Trump, it is easy for them to celebrate this. If people oppose him, it’s harder.
But they should still do it.
This is an instance where your team doesn’t matter. Fogel, 63, isn’t an Eagle. He’s Saquon Barkley. He’s a history teacher who has spent his life teaching kids in Russia, Malaysia, Venezuela and other points on the globe. He’s served his country by being the guy who taught children about the Declaration of Independence. He’s the genuinely nice guy doing genuinely nice things.
There are plenty of points where people can disagree about who is doing what and why and how and whether they should at all. That’s politics and there will always be battles to wage.
But if you can’t root for the Eagles, find your Saquon moments. This is one of them.