It's a hard time to be a Patriots fan these days, for reasons I will let someone who writes about these things much better than I do explain to you:
"I'm a Pats fan, which means I'm a spoiled, obnoxious, shortsighted, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately buffoon that can take a 13-3, #1 seed in the AFC season and spin it to make it seem like I'm forced to root for a Pop Warner team with a defense comprised almost entirely of players who wore floaties to the pool until they turned 21..." "...deep down inside me lives a paranoid, nervous, overly pessimistic fan. I've named him Hank, and I'm very embarrassed of what he has done to me as a football fan...Hank has forced me to spend Sunday mornings in a a sickening mix of pure elation and paralyzing anxiety, fully aware that what is about to occur over the span of the next three hours is going to fully dictate whether or not I feel one ounce of happiness over the next full week of my life. In no way is it healthy, normal, or mentally beneficial and at some point I'm going to have to make a serious life change."
You'd think that the Pats' convincing win over the Broncs would make for a week living on Easy Street. And you'd be identically wrong. The fact that the boys basically ripped through Denver like a hot knife through butter actually makes it all much, much worse. Why? You don't have to dig too far into our regional DNA to figure out that our Puritan heritage still has us in its iron grip. For those of you who slept through that lecture in history class, the Puritans were the fun-loving folk who came over from England, that hotbed of sin and scandal, to live a theologically pure and unblemished life, and then proceeded to squabble with one another about what that consisted of. And their theology is enough to make a strong man cry. To grossly oversimplify, the Puritans believed that the only way to get to Heaven was to be one of the elect. However, the kicker is that you don't know if God's chosen you to be one of the elect or one of the rabble, unless you're Catholic, in which case you pretty much know you're doomed. But then, to add a however to the however, if you are the elect and don't know it, you can get yourself unelected in a fast hurry by not worshipping God the way you ought, and since you don't know if you're one of their number until you die, you'd better keep your nose to the grindstone just in case. And then, on top of that, different church leaders had different ideas about what constituted the 'right' way to worship, so they were forever exiling one another over theological controversies most of us couldn't make head nor tails of.
Now take this laff riot of a bunch and stick them in New England, a place where, let's be honest, folks, the weather pretty much stinks a great portion of the time, and you get a negative reinforcement loop. Had a nice summer? Watch out, it's gonna be a haaahhd wintah all right. Beautiful dry spring? Hope there ain't a drought this summah. Lovely, clear, crisp winter day? It'll freeze yah right t'yah bones tonight, ayuh. Add that as background to the constant worry about whether or not your eternal soul is going to fry like a bug on an electrified fence once you kick the bucket, and what do you get? A people who know suffering. Who get suffering. Who are good at it. This is where the Pats come in. What better symbol of New England's home team than Bill Belichick? The sight of BB in his 3-for-$10-sale-at-Walgreen's cutoff hoodies resonates with us. Just look at his face - here's a man who realizes that it can all turn to a pile of sh!t in a hot second because we are all sinners in the hand of an angry God, and that's when his team's winning. No wonder he washed out as "Dr. Doom" in the eternally optimistic Midwest; those people think anything can be fixed with a good casserole. We like a guy who can look at a winning performance and see nothing but an endless string of flaws; this is the part of the world, after all, where loving parents used to drag their children up to the edge of freshly dug graves so they could look upon their eventual fate. If you can't see the skull beneath the skin, or the fatal weaknesses in the O-line, well then, move the hell away to Florida with everyone else.
So the true New Englander-slash-Pats fan is going to find this week a living hell. Is our team truly one of the NFL elect, or are we deluding ourselves right up to the gates of Paradise, only to watch God's chosen walk through? Will we make it to the Promised Land, only to fall in the Slough of Despond? Will we be tempted to idolatry, worshipping the trinity of Gronk, Hernandez and Welker, or will we remain strong in the one true Brady? Dear heavens, will our defense hold up against the Ravens long enough to get us to the final matchup against the 49ers, or even Satan's own minions, the Jints??? Alec Shane's articles about the misery of being a Pats fan are brilliant, but he got one critical detail wrong: If you're a New England fan, your inner pessimist isn't really Hank. We're all channeling our inner Cotton Mather.
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