Ending Badly

This is how messed up Philly Fan is from the decades of championship-free major sports: people are worried that our hopes are too high.

No, I'm serious.

You see, it's not enough to just savor, for a little while, a home opener when the weather was as perfect as the home team. Patriots Fan watched The Horror Of Tom Brady's Knee Injury (I think they should have taken him off on a wheelchair, then had him fall in a heap as he tried to run back on the field -- and why, yes, I am Still Bitter over Faker Pierce).

Colts Fan watched Peyton Manning whiff at home against the Kyle Orton Bears, mostly because they no longer seem to have a center. Chargers Fan watched their team get smacked in the face by a Steve Smith-less Panthers team. You'd think that with the Injury Gods passing over us on this day, and even the special teams looking like the Super Bowl Year, it was just a good day to sit back and relax.

You would, of course, also have no real clue how Eagle Fan thinks.

While the game was on, the Shooter Sister was counseling against exuberance, because she had been to a game Just Like This One (i.e., the 2006 home opener, when the Giants hit on an improbable fourth quarter comeback).

After the game was out of hand and the Rams were "driving" towards their one field goal score of the day (albeit with no third down conversions), the room started to grumble.

And on sports talk radio later (yes, I know, I shouldn't have given them the opportunity), the hosts were also saying how this meant nothing, and things would be very different and much harder against Dallas in Dallas next Monday night. As if that didn't go without saying.

Let me save all of the haters some time here. Of course it's all going to end badly. Of course McNabb is getting hurt and Andy Reid's Kids will go on a six-state crime spree and the players will get hurt and yada yada yada.

But you know what? Life ends badly, too. There is no reason for you to think otherwise, or that your candidate will win, your kids will grow up to be healthy and successful, your job will be another but a brain-killing timesuck, and so on, and so on.

Pull the wool over your own eyes. Give yourself the possibility of a pleasant outcome. Act like you've been to the winners circle before, and expect to go there again.

Or, um, be an Eagles Fan...