By Ray Montana, Senior Correspondent, Ritualized American Spectacle
January 26, 2025
It’s the same Super Bowl. The same teams. The same quarterbacks. The same corporate ads pitched by the same dead-eyed actors from the same streaming shows you never watched. It’s Eagles vs. Chiefs again and no one seems to be asking if maybe the calendar broke.
We were here in 2023. Trump was a punchline again. COVID was mostly over, mostly forgotten. Taylor Swift was still writing songs about Jake Gyllenhaal. And the Eagles lost.
Now it’s 2025. Trump is back. The climate is off its meds. Half the country thinks the other half is a psy-op. And we’re all sitting in front of our TVs watching the exact same game with the exact same stakes and the exact same teams pretending it isn’t weird.
The broadcasters don’t mention it. The analysts don’t mention it. You can see it in the eyes of the camera operators though, those thousand-yard stares between cutaways to someone’s $9 million chicken wing commercial. The sense that time isn’t passing anymore, it’s just folding in on itself like poorly laminated stadium nachos.
And at the center of the spiral is Taylor Swift, perched in her box seats with the poise of someone who knows her mere presence can derail entire congressional hearings. The camera cuts to her. Again. Again. Again. MAGA Twitter froths and foams and starts dissecting frame-by-frame footage to see if her bracelet spells out DEI. Half of Fox News has to go outside and scream into a decorative hedge.
The romance might be real. It might be manufactured. It might be some kind of high-frequency national sedative designed to keep the women watching, the men arguing, and the advertisers paying. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Reality is branding now. Love is just a pre-roll ad for the playoffs. The only thing more profitable than falling in love in America is falling in love while helping someone win the Super Bowl.
And Eagles fans don’t care. Win or lose, the city will burn. They’ll grease the poles, then climb them anyway. They’ll flip cars over while singing ballads about Jalen Hurts. They’ll fight cops and each other and the basic laws of physics because celebration and riot are the same verb in Philadelphia. It’s not about winning. It’s about catharsis.
Meanwhile, Travis Kelce is running post routes like a golden retriever hopped up on creatine and God. His brother’s retired now, watching from a luxury box in a sleeveless hoodie like a Greek demigod on cheat day. Taylor is cheering. Andy Reid is sweating. America is collectively holding its breath to see which city will break itself in half first. Kansas City, bless its smoky, barbecue-sweet soul, remains one of the few American cities where community still means something and football still feels like civic religion instead of marketing theater.
You can feel the country watching this rerun of a moment it swears it already lived. Like flipping channels and landing on an episode you know by heart. The plays don’t matter. The outcome doesn’t matter. What matters is the ritual. The halftime show. The ads. The illusion of progress. The slow march through the same gate in the same fence toward the same ending.
It’s not football anymore. It’s performance art on a trillion-dollar budget. As Woody Allen once said, “The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction.” Football, in this spectacle, serves as the ultimate distraction. It’s distraction as doctrine. It’s the only religion left that still prints hats in every size. And no one’s allowed to question the loop. Because this time the commercials are better. This time the tight end is dating an international pop star. This time maybe it means something.
This is America’s Groundhog Day. And the shadow on the field is long.
Filed from a Philadelphia dive bar with no windows, where every drink is named after a playoff heartbreak and the jukebox keeps skipping back to “Shake It Off” like it’s trying to warn us.
