The Patriots Just Made Parenting Harder

I don't know about you, but I'm still recovering from Sunday night.

Inexplicably, my 8-year-old son has become a Patriots superfan. He's basically a miniature version of Tommy from Quinzee. And all through the first three quarters he kept insisting that the Patties could still come back. And I, being from Philadelphia, tried to explain the facts of life to him: That no one comes back from a 25-point deficit in the Super Bowl. That the Pats weren't going to score 19-unanswered points in the fourth. That Atlanta was just the better team that day. That becoming a sports fan means inviting heartache and misery into your world on a regular basis because the tragedies outnumber the happy-endings by 10-to-1. Even for great teams.

That the lesson I took from growing up as an Eagles fan was that for some people there are no happy endings. Ever.

And then that happened. I don't know what they'll call it when Super Bowl LI moves from being mere news to mythology. The Comeback? The Houston Miracle? The Boston TD Party?

All I know is that it undermined all of the lessons I was trying to teach my kid and set him up for impossible expectations for the rest of his sports life. Imagine your worldview if the very first time you watched a Super Bowl was that game? It's all downhill from there.