This Is The Price Of Success
This weekend, the Philadelphia Eagles fell in Super Bowl 57 to the Kansas City Chiefs by a score of 38-35. It was a painful loss, from a 10-point blown halftime lead, to an absentee run game, to an inability to stop Patrick Mahomes, and even to an awful playing surface and a poor job of officiating in the biggest moment of the game. What made the game hurt even more, though, was what led up to it. The 2023 Eagles were the greatest team we had ever seen play football in this city, and they have spent the past 5 months rampaging through the rest of the NFL. They were an absolute juggernaut, poised to hoist the franchise’s second Lombardi and cement Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni as the next great QB-Coach duo in the league. And then, in just a half of football, it was all gone. Vanished into thin air, with a feeling of “Damn, all that for nothing.” First of all, if you’re feeling that way, you’re not alone. Secondly, know that this is a temporary feeling, and with time, it’s likely that we will be able to appreciate how special this year was. But finally, and most importantly, we have to know that this is the price of sports success.
Nick Sirianni talked all year long about climbing a mountain as an analogy for the Eagles’ season, and how the team needs to take everything step by step. Well, when you get closer and closer to the top of the mountain, the path becomes much more treacherous. On top of that, you have much further to fall. It’s true on Everest, and it’s true in sports. The Eagles got as close to the peak as you can get without summitting the mountain, and so they had a long, long way to fall when they came up short. That extends to us as fans of the team, and it’s something that we need to get used to. This Philadelphia Eagles core is far from done. Jalen Hurts proved Sunday that he is the real deal, Nick Sirianni is a great leader, and you have the best General Manager in football (and possibly sports in general) running the roster construction. There are no guarantees that this team will be back, but they are as well set up as any team in the NFC to have sustained success. On top of that, the Phillies and the Sixers are both still in legitimate championship windows. This will not be the last time we feel this way.
Ask any sports fan who has had the benefit of living through a dynasty. Ask a Boston fan. Ask a New York Yankees fan. If you know anyone over the age of 60 who is a Cowboys fan you can ask them. With higher expectations come higher stakes and higher levels of disappointment when seasons end in failure. You think there were any Houston Texans fans sobbing at the end of the season? I wrote a similar article to this one when the Phillies fell to the Houston Astros in the World Series back in early November, and that loss pales in comparison to what we witnessed this past Sunday. If we’re lucky, I’ll be writing another one of these later this summer following an outstanding playoff run by the Sixers that lead them to the NBA Finals. And over the next couple of years, hopefully there will even be a couple of celebratory ones following championships. But, as we continue this new level of winning in this generation of Philly sports, we have to be prepared to pay this type of heartbreak as the price of success.
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