It’s hard to describe the mood in Philadelphia right now. I likened it to the movie Meet the Parents where he has the perfect engagement set up and then through a series of escalating bad circumstances, the whole thing collapses. What appears clear destiny suddenly has you saying, “Sorry I cared so much.” I know nothing has collapsed. We haven’t even lost a game. But it feels as though we were robbed of something. (We were robbed of a lead. That last run was a joke and now our stud pitcher can’t win the game.)
It runs deeper than baseball though. Everyone keeps saying, “That’s just Philly.” “We wouldn’t do it any other way.” But that’s what sucks so much. For 21 hours there, it appeared that we would do it a different way. It looked as though we were actually just going to come through, win big, and have a huge party. It looked like optimism would actually be rewarded. We can’t stop the murder rate. We can’t offer decent public education. We can’t develop our waterfront which has been in proposal for 20 years. But at least the Phillies won. That’s what we are supposed to be saying right now.
Someone from Oregon asked me today, “Do you think it’d really make a difference in the city if they won?” And my thought was this. We’d still have murders and drugs and unemployment. But as it is, we’ve succumbed to these things. We are defeated. “That’s just Philly. That’s the way everything goes around here.” And for a moment, we could’ve said, “No, actually, the Phillies won the world series.”
They probably still will. Nonetheless, today was simply depressing. It was 35 and snowing here today. Not like fluffy snow. The kind that forms slush, so that your socks immediately get wet because you basically are in 2 inches of water. In the midst of it, my car died. And I sat there, wet, in my cold car and thought, “This freakin’ city.”
I guess that’s Philly.
I would argue that today, today is Philly. That “you said we couldn’t but now we did” attitude. We just need to keep the “we can do anything” feeling going.
This is brilliant.
A man will go to long lengths after a……..cheesesteak. Problem for you is, what if the Phils are back in the playoffs next season and suddenly Ryan Howard is doing commercials endorsing something like, oh say, HD TVs? You might have to think a bit harder before taking an oath. But then again, this is Philly.