Champs

On the one-week anniversary of a certain sporting event, I feel the need to put into words some of the joys that I am experiencing. This is incomplete and poorly edited due to serious time constraints, but I wanted to get something out there before the moment fades. Well, okay, this moment is never really going to fade. Here is the current state of affairs:

The Indianapolis Colts are Super Bowl Champions and I am very happy about it.

I would empty the thesaurus trying to communicate to you how I feel about this, and the superlatives would wear down from overuse. Instead, in no particular order, here are some specific reasons why I’m very happy about my World Champion Colts:

(Disclaimer: I am, in true fan-style, frequently going to refer to the Colts as “we.” I am not going to apologize for this or justify it.)

I love that Indianapolis finally got its first major league championship in my lifetime. We only have two major league franchises in this town. Both have been remarkably above-average for quite some time, but neither has gotten over the hump, usually thanks to perennial-evil-nemesis teams like the Patriots and Knicks. We have our championship at long last, and we did it with class, heartfelt joy, and a total lack of burning cars or riot police. Some people will continue to put forth the never-ending cynical contention that professional sports serve merely as resource-sucking distractions to the things that really matter in life. Those people were not present on Monday night inside the packed-to-capacity Hoosier Dome or along the crowded streets of sub-zero Indianapolis as a joyous population screamed its lungs out congratulating our team in person on its triumphant return to Indy. That sense of community energy and raucous rejoicing was exactly why sports matter. As Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Kravitz put it, “Championships are more than just parties that last deep into the night. They are generational keepsakes.”

I love that this year, of all years, was our time. For the three years leading up to this one, our season looked like this: A great deal of offensive beauty and grace, serious ass-kicking of teams of all sorts, and then some manner of playoff debacle loss to the eventual Super Bowl champ. There have been near-undefeated seasons (we were 13-0 last year) and record-breaking seasons (Manning’s 49 TDs in 2004) but they’ve all petered out in the postseason. This is unspeakably disheartening and will do major damage to a fan's psyche.

This year, however, the Colts started 9-0 and had some quality wins, but then things fell apart. We finished with the fourth-worst rushing defense in NFL history and lost for the first time in ten meetings to the freaking Houston Texans, one of the worst franchises in professional sports. We got destroyed by Jacksonville to the tune of 375 yards rushing, a game that I didn’t actually watch because I sensed the impending disaster (and because I was playing street hockey at the time). It got so bad that I actually said to a friend, “I’m not giving up, but I am reallocating emotional capital from this season to next season, because I can not go through last year’s heartbreak again.” Well, as it turns out, there is a lot to be said for losing. Apparently my dad was right, and you can build a ton of character from heartbreaks such as being dumped by Jenny Meeks in 8th grade, not getting into Northwestern, or allowing a career-high rushing total to Ron Dayne. Through all of that sports muck, our faithful coach stayed the course, believing that things would come together when they needed to, believing in his players, his staff, and himself. And it worked. Each and every time in the playoffs that the Colts had every reason to panic, they didn’t. The just kept on grinding it out, believing that the best outcome was still within reach. It always was.

I love the way we plowed through the postseason. After dispatching the overmatched Chiefs, we went on to beat the first, second, and third ranked defenses in the league. That accomplishment is nothing but pure grit. For a team that had been dismissed as finesse and timing and a little soft, the Colts showed up game after game, read the defense, made adjustments, and just ground out three showcase wins. They adjusted, took what they were given, and found a way to keep moving, converting a postseason-record 56% of their third downs. They wore down defenses with long drives of pure will, keeping the other team’s offenses off the field for absurd lengths of time. The defense showed up, stuffed the run, hit hard, and forced turnovers. It was a wonderful thing to watch.

I love that our beloved quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning is – at least within the subset of NFL quarterbacks – somewhat of a dork. He is an anal, obsessive-compulsive preparer, as evidenced by this bit of inside observation during Super Bowl week (scroll to the bottom, start reading at the second-to-last paragraph). He is a consummate student of the game, the sort of guy who believes that there is no ceiling to the harder-you-work/better-you-get curve. He doesn’t date supermodels, he has an enormous forehead that often develops a red helmet-rash during games, and, in the words of my friend Brad, he “slowly shakes his head like a bobblehead when he talks, makes tens of millions of dollars a year yet has focused no time or money toward controlling his adult acne, and he has an elementary school haircut.” In fairness, let me be clear about two things:

1. Peyton’s dorkiness is not an absolute fact, it is just the opinion of some people. Others make the very astute observation that Peyton is, after all, one of the most famous sports figures in the world, has great relationship with the press, appears in multiple national commercials and also sometimes plays onstage with major recording artists. My friend Nate’s counter-dork point regarding Peyton is very simply, “women want him, and men want to be him.” So, yes, “dork” is a relative and contested term.

2. There is not a hint of negativity or derision in my assessment of Peyton as Dork. It makes me love the guy even more, in fact. He is in many ways the anti-Tom Brady. I mean, would Peyton ever attempt something like this?

No, he would not, and we Hoosiers thank the sweet Baby Jesus for that. And likewise, Brady could never pull off this:


Heh heh heh. Seriously, this makes me laugh every time.

I also love Peyton Manning because he could have been Ryan Leaf. Colts fans should take a moment every day to imagine the train wreck that would have ensued if we had drafted the big-mouth/tiny-talent combo of Leaf over the studious, determined Manning. That train wreck looks like this: The Los Angeles Colts.

I love the rest of the team too. I love the bone-jarring hits of Bob “The Belt Sander” Sanders (nickname invented by my brother, somebody still needs to tell Bob). I love the impossible catches made by Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne, game after game after game. I love the simian way that Dallas Clark stands at the line of scrimmage, and the ridiculous catches that he makes despite being a big goofy Iowan. I love that Cato June’s Fantasy Football Team was called “Juneimus D Great.” I love that Booger McFarland can weigh nine hundred pounds and still put a ballerina-quality spin move on Olin Kreutz to sack Rex Grossman. I love that Hunter Smith is the most accurate holder in NFL history, even though there is no such statistic. I love that Joesph Addai is only a rookie, and that I get to watch him juke tacklers for years to come. I just love this team, inside and out.

I love that this postseason contained the single greatest sporting contest I have ever witnessed, the 38-34 AFC Championship victory over the New England Patriots. With all due respect* to Bears fans, this game was our Super Bowl. Everything after that not quite postscript or a foregone conclusion, but it was pretty close. I won’t go into depth regarding this rivalry. If you know about it, there is no point in discussing it, and if you don’t know, the closest I can come to it is this: Imagine the neighbor kid beating up your kid once a year and having to sit inside your house and watch it. I cannot overstate how much this team has been the bane of our existence. And in the middle of the second quarter of that AFC title game, it looked like the same story all over again: Every bounce going the Patriots way, our QB looking rattled, our defense unable to stop the run, down an impossible 21-3. You simply do not come back from 21-3 against the Pats. But nobody panicked. I mean, sure, at my brother’s house we were mostly dead inside, but we did not give up, and neither did our coach, our QB, or anyone else. What followed was the most beautiful, gritty, unpredictable, hard-earned comeback that I have ever seen. It was joyous and terrifying to watch, every second of it. My pulse was well over 100 for the entire fourth quarter, and I was sitting down most of the time. This city will always remember the 32-yard strike to Brian Fletcher, Reggie Wayne reaching up, practically in slow motion, to bring in a bobbled ball, and Joseph Addai running untouched into the end zone for the game winning score.

The outcome was in doubt right up to the end, but when Tom Brady’s final pass landed in the arms of Marlin Jackson, fear died in the heart of every Colts fan. The little crew of diehards assembled at my brother’s house simply exploded. Adam, Ash, Mr. and Mrs. B and I leaped around the room, screaming and hugging each other, tears in our eyes, hoarse from the shouting, hardly able to believe that it was actually over. That, friends, is an epic sporting contest, and the good guys won.

*Note: Amount of respect due varies depending on specific Bears fan.

I love the fact that like all championships, ours rested on a knife-edge, hanging perilously in the balance on more than one occasion so much so that to look back on it makes me a little nervous. The Baltimore and New England games could have turned out so differently if just one single play, one bounce of the ball, one fingertip, one thrown flag, one dropped pass had gone the other direction. That’s how hard it is to win the whole thing in any sport. You have to be excellent in everything and overcome the narrowest of margins with skill and, no doubt about it, luck. And we did. Finally.

I love how hard it was raining during the Super Bowl, one of those relentless South Florida downpours that soaks you to the bone in under a minute. It was scary at first, but in the end it only emphasized how unstoppable we were this year: not even a flood was going to stop us.

I love our coach. Grace, class, kindness, leadership, and an unapologetic Christian. We are fortunate to have him. This victory celebration quote sums him up perfectly: “There’s not one guy out here that you wouldn’t want your son to be like, and that’s probably more important to me than anything.” You know he is not saying that lightly.


I love that my emotional investment in this team – this group of highly-paid strangers who play a game for a living – is completely out of proportion, because it is important in this life to be joyfully ridiculous about some things. This is one of my things, and oh how sweet it is.

I love that this team and this title make me believe that there will be more Super Bowls headed our way, and soon.

What do you love, Colts fans?