I’d like to say my rural neighbors here in Portugal wouldn’t understand, but with the fatherly-fostered passion they have for the Benfica football “club”, I can only guess they viewed my decision to make the two and a half hour drive to Lisbon in order to watch the Super Bowl live as something within the realm of reason.

I can’t remember the last Super Bowl I watched, and given the time and distance that eventually carried me away from my American lifestyle, I relegated my interest in stats and up-coming weekend match ups to merely checking divisional standings on occasion. However, this Super Bowl was different: The Philadelphia Eagles, my team, had another rarely seen chance to get hold of the Vince Lombardi Trophy. This wasn’t just a matter of sports for me, or to merely reassert my identity as an American living abroad. This was family.

I was raised on the Philadelphia Eagles. The year they won against Green Bay in the 1960 Championship Game was the year I was born, and in the ensuing years through adolescence and onward, my father would take my brothers and me to each and every season’s home game from Franklin Field to Veterans Stadium, with the occasional bonus of dinner at Dante and Luigi’s afterward. My father was at that 1960 Championship game and diligently kept his seats from one stadium to the next, waiting for “next year” and another chance. I was genetically wired to hate the Dallas Cowboys and had Eagles history woven into the very fabric of my being. The blood that runs through my veins to this day is green, and nothing could ever change that.

The time difference between Lisbon and Minneapolis is six hours, which made kickoff at 12:30am and plenty of time get down to Lisbon. All in all, a drop in the ocean compared to 57 years of waiting. However, first on the agenda was some pre-game warm up: a Philly cheese steak for lunch before the drive, washed down with a couple of Budweisers of course. Unfortunately, a Philly big “twist” soft pretzel was out of reach. European cuisine only goes so far. For the way down, I downloaded numerous songs from Springsteen and Sinatra, the theme song from “Rocky”, and the “Fly, Eagles, fly” fight song just for good measure. With my Philadelphia football t-shirt on, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt my father smiling from above.

The only place in Lisbon, and maybe all of Portugal for all I knew, that was showing the game was the Hard Rock Café, but when I called to book a reservation, I was told it was full, which for some reason surprised me. This is Europe, I thought; however, think again,… it’s the Super Bowl. When there’s a will to get through the door, there’s a way to get through the door, and with that, I started up the car and headed south. What others, besides myself so far from home, were looking for a piece of that American dream on a field of a hundred yards as only Americans could measure it?

Once in Lisbon, a good omen was given to me by the gracious hostess as I was found a place on the second level of the restaurant next to the massive big-screen TV: First row seats. Somehow, I couldn’t help but feel my father was pulling strings and greasing divine palms somewhere above to get me in the door. A mixture of both Portuguese and Americans wearing New England or Philly colors arrayed the place. I ordered the ribs and lined up the beers. This was going to be better than I thought.

The place erupted in the clock-stopping time that followed, but the focused concern of the employees of the Hard Rock Café in Lisbon that night soon became the one customer on the second level near the big-screen. The floor manager and my server were polite, but approached me with caution as if a danger to myself and everyone in the room. With every play I was leaning over the railing and banging the table with every stop or significant gain. I disregarded everyone and held every moment as if alone, as if each play unfolding was affecting the very space I was occupying.

The collective Eagles franchise history was a matrix of possessed air around me: Chuck Bednarik, Harold Carmicheal, Jaws, Tommy McDonald, Pete Retzlaff , Wilbert Montgomery, Brian Dawkins, and David Akers among all the others gathered and filled the room across the five thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean that separated Europe from American shores, across fifty-seven years of waiting for “next year”.

To the others, it was just a game, but for me it was family. And in the zeitgeist of the current American political arena beyond blood, beyond the personal, it was, as best as I could explain to the young Portuguese couple near me, a drama of the blue-collar, working-class underdogs, who no one had faith in, against the elitist idea of the privileged status quo being played out in a public forum for the world to consider and witness. Foles, who bounced around the league with nothing more than average talent, a second option substitute, was holding his own against celebrity in an upper-class neighborhood with reserved-only parking by doing the one thing he needed to do: his job. It was a job among other jobs that others had to do that night, a collective effort of ordinary anybodys with an unremarkable background, and in the moment when Brandon Graham stripped Brady of his God-given right to history, the world saw it all change.

After the exchange of hugs and handshakes with attending Philly fans and the quiet retreat of humiliated Patriot ex-pats, everyone went in their own direction and disappeared into Lisbon’s night. I looked at my watch: 3:45 am. The streets were empty and quiet, and appeared strange to me. There were no celebrations, no honking of horns, no earth- shattering screams of finally realized dreams. As I walked back to the car, I thought of my father and how so much as changed, how the words “next year” mean something completely different now.