Do you know where you were the night of January 28th, 2001?
I can tell you where I was: walking south on St. Paul Street in Baltimore as the city erupted in fireworks, the powerful concussions punctuated every now and then by the clatter of celebratory gunfire. Flanked by two of my writing buddies, I made my way to the Inner Harbor through ever-thickening crowds, basking in the general euphoria, which united graduate student, suburbanite, and thug in one glorious celebration.
The Ravens had won the Superbowl!
Judging from the joyful mayhem, which seemed to erase all the usual daytime distinctions — race, class, and sobriety, to name a few — you would have thought we’d just won World War Three.
In fact, in the days and weeks that followed, the only way I could find to describe the city’s transformation that night had its roots in wartime. “It was like V-J Day,” I said, calling to mind Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of a sailor planting a victory kiss on a lady in Times Square, c.1945.
Of course it was nothing at all like V-J Day. We hadn’t just defeated the Japanese, or been tested by four exhausting years of total war. The people celebrating the Superbowl victory in the shadow of the USS Constellation weren’t in uniform. Or if they were, it was a purple and black football jersey, not starched dress whites. There was no spontaneous kissing of strangers. That kind of thing is frowned upon these days, and called by a different name: sexual assault.
But there were certain similarities, even if the hullaballoo was on a local scale, as opposed to the national. Our team had won! Baltimore, a city on the skids, brought to its knees by the flight of heavy industry, emptied out by decades of middle class citizens fleeing the ravages of poverty and violence, an urban pariah, a joke to our well-heeled neighbors to the north, south, east, and west — humble Baltimore had beaten a team from the great state of New York, and won Superbowl XXXV.
It was a terrific excuse to go crazy. Of course, I had a few additional excuses of my own. I was working a pressure-cooker of a job, producing live television with professors from the Wharton School. Our daughter, bless her heart, was two years old, but still wasn’t sleeping through the night. Sleep deprivation and work stress were doing wonders for my marriage. And my ambitions as a writer were on indefinite hold as I struggled to demonstrate to my family that I could be the provider that everyone seemed to expect me to be.
All of it contributed to the feeling of bliss that accompanied the Superbowl win, a release from my worldly cares that happened to coincide with ten thousand of my fellow citizens’ releasing theirs.
I still remember it as one of the happiest nights of my life, and one of the few times I’ve ever felt in complete harmony with my countrymen.
These victory pageants have a dark side, too. No doubt the beer I sipped nervously — and copiously — throughout the game helped blind me to the night’s excesses: the public drunkenness; the random acts of vandalism; the cursing; in other words, the violent side of an unleashed citizenry, the channeling of countless small frustrations into a wild Bacchanal.
Fast forward to February 3rd, 2013, a mere twelve years later. The Ravens are finally — finally! — back in the Superbowl. Alas, adult life has intervened. I’m no longer the football fan I once was, but it’s comforting to see at least one familiar name from the last go-round: Ray Lewis, a player whose fame and notoriety have grown in equal measure. There’s a valedictory quality to the game, which promises to be Ray’s last, a swan song for a linebacker, but also for the vaunted defense that won the Ravens their first championship.
This time, I’m not watching in a sports bar, surrounded by friends; I’m watching at home in our family room, nestled on the sofa with our daughter, now a teenager, and a football fan in her own right — albeit a fair-weather one, just like me.
Televisions are huge and flat now, and the bone-crushing hits are replayed endlessly in Super Slo-mo and Hi-Def, but the emotional highs and lows are the same. Nina retreats to her room in the third quarter, when things start to go south for the Ravens; the suspense is too much for her to bear.
And then the clock runs out, the confetti rains down, and the Ravens are the champions of Superbowl XLVII.
Fireworks rattle the windowpanes. It’s as noisy outside as a Saturday afternoon in late summer.
I ask myself: should I go downtown? Is it possible to recapture that feeling of total abandon, to lose oneself in middle age, when life is — knock wood — pretty darn good?
I glance at the clock. It’s practically midnight, almost Monday, a work day. They’re showing scenes from downtown on the local news. The crowds look drunk, noisy — and, honestly, a little scary.
“Go Ravens!” I say, turning off the TV and heading to bed.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 14 February 2013
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
