How You View the Patriots Dynasty is a Window Into Your Soul

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This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. And by “lately,” I mean for the last 17 years. And my thought is this: How you’ve looked at this Patriots dynasty is more a reflection of you than it says anything about them.

I’m not sure if it was Voltaire or Dalton who said “Appreciation is a wonderful thing; It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” This occurred to me all last week when the Patriots had nothing but a 14-point underdog standing between them and a seventh straight trip to the AFC title game and all the talk in the Boston papers, the sports radio shows and the New England cable sports networks was all about ESPN articles, rifts, forced trades, bad blood, personal trainers and how the end of this run is staring us in the face. So the Pats win in uber-convincing fashion and now the gears have all shifted to how “lucky” they are because the No. 5 seed beat the 4, and now the No. 3 has beaten the 2. Just haters, talking to other haters about how much they hate. I am literally, on an hourly basis, hearing people who get paid to put what we are witnessing in context say that the Patriots aren’t that good, the rest of the NFL just sucks. I am not making this up.

Think about that for a second. The fossilized remains of the same press corps who were calling Boston “Loserville” at the turn of the century are now judging the Patriots not by comparing them to the 31 other teams they’ve had to beat all this time, but by some other standard. What that is, exactly, I don’t know. Whether they’re comparing them to the Chicago Bears of the 1940s, the ’27 Yankees, the Norse gods in Valhalla or the Justice League is up to them. I’d rather not try to figure it out. I’m just saying that if you are witness to this level of performance over such an unprecedented period of time in a league built to prevent exactly this kind of sustained excellence and can’t appreciate it? Worse, that you feel the need to diminish it? Then may God have mercy on your soul.

But this is what we’ve been hearing in some form or another during this whole run from these ass nuggets. That it hasn’t been about greatness. It’s been Tuck Rules. Bad weather. A system quarterback. Arrogance. Spy cameras. Luck. Warm Gatorade. Deflators. Dorito Dinks. Tomato cans.

The Buddhists have a philosophy of living in the moment. They tell a fable of a monk who is being chased by a bear, so he jumps off a cliff (a real cliff, not the one Max Kellerman says Brady is hitting) and grabs a branch. And as he’s dangling there, a tiger comes along under him. So while the monk is hanging on for dear life, with certain death above and below, he finds a bunch of grapes on the branch and starts eating them. And he’s happy because they are really good. The point being that the past is important only because it made you what you are and the future is an illusion, so enjoy the present. And if your form of enjoyment is saying the present really isn’t any good or fixated on how it’s all going to end in that illusory future, then you are wasting your precious life on this planet and I have no sympathy for you.

Count me and anybody I want in my life among those who are going to make the most of this and enjoy every second of it. With no end in sight. We. Stand. United.

@jerrythornton1