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.

In a sense, I pity him. But perhaps it’s best this way. The cold of reality will hit all the harder once Brady retires and Belichick is called back to the Netherworld. Then my son will be ready to experience the true desolation and futility of sports fandom. The hate will flow through him. And I shall teach him how to pack a snowball around a D-cell. It’s his patrimony.