I apologize for bringing up a topic that has been discussed but I keep coming across this odd phenomenon where many people I talk to feels like the Championship “doesn’t feel real.” From friends, family, and even many players and others, they all say the same thing.
This intrigues me not only as an original 12, but as a dime store psychologist (missed my calling). It’s an intriguing aspect of this victory I cannot put my head around.
I can’t profess to tell you why this is happening but it is happening. Would love to hear open minded theories to this strange tangent to this incredible season.
Just yesterday, I watched JSN give an interview to his home town news affiliate in Texas and when asked about how he was processing the aftermath he literally said it still doesn’t feel real to him yet. Like not at all.
Is this normal? I don’t seem to recall me feeling I couldn’t accept our victory in XLVIII. I was fully engaged and immersed.
This game has a strange aura about it. Logically I get we won obviously, I saw the same footage you all did. But the air of shock or surprise I guess does linger.
SB48 had a long lead-up. The team was absolutely dominant and obviously ascendant in 2012. We had a stable few years of something big building on defense leading to 2012 when it started coming together in a huge fashion. We had a whole off-season after 2012 knowing we were the best team in the league and had the thought that we'd be ridiculously hard to stop from bringing the whole thing home in 2013, and we were right.
This, however...
They were frustrating in 2024, offense looked inept and not for the fault of a single player. There was no "we just need a quarterback." We overhauled the team in a way that very few thought would lead to our immediate ascension as a juggernaut, even among fans of trading DK, sending Geno to Vegas, signing Darnold, etc.
It looked like 10-7 with a young roster and flexibility going forward. But we underestimated how coaching affects talent.
There was no young Will-Not-Be-Denied Russell Wilson at quarterback, no larger-than-life Lynch-esque earth mover at running back, and a very good defense that appeared to still have talent gaps that'd prevent them from being fully great.
Instead, we had Sam "Paranormal Investigator" Darnold who most of us were expecting to see ghosts, a couple of good backs neither of which we imagined as a Super Bowl MVP, one less physical-unicorn uniform-selling stalwart in DK, and a new vision from top to bottom on offense.
It doesn't feel real I think because, unlike 2013, we weren't all thinking "we're going to the god damn Super Bowl this year" all offseason or saying "we should be in this god damn Super Bowl" last season.
I think it snuck up on us, so we didn't have that years-long narrative where the greatness of the team had long sunk in for the fanbase at large.
