Take a Little Trip With Me

Wow. Maybe I’ll just quit watching football now. I mean no, I won’t actually quit watching football. But I say that because it’s hard for me to imagine a more storybook-perfect season than the one the Denver Broncos just finished with that 24–10 victory over the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50.

That last sentence was a really fun sentence to type, by the way.

When I say storybook-perfect season, I’m sure that you, dear reader, grasp what I’m referring to, in part; namely, the Peyton-Manning-riding-off-into-the-sunset thing, which was probably the most talked-about narrative during the Category 5 media hurricane which constitutes the week prior to Super Bowl Sunday. The Sheriff’s Last Rodeo. And yeah, it’s definitely the linchpin, the nexus. But oh man, there’s so much more to it than the story of one quarterback. And that full tapestry of the story of the Broncos’ season, is the reason why they walked off the field on Sunday as Super Bowl champions.

Again, fun sentence to type.

Neglecting that full tapestry, by the way, is why all the pundits (and Las Vegas) got it wrong, in terms of pre-game predictions. That tendency to look at the quarterbacks — both Cam Newton and Peyton Manning, in this case — standing in the bright spotlight, and neglect to notice all those other players standing around them. On the Cam-hand, the problem was assuming that he actually was Superman, which he’s not. And on the Peyton-hand, it was assuming that he was done, a broken-down old man; which, he wasn’t. Instead, he was a quarterback who went through a profound shift over the course of the season, in terms of his sense of himself as a player and of his role as a member of the team. A quarterback who realized that it wasn’t what he did on the playing field anymore, but rather what he didn’t do, that had become the thing that mattered.

And really, Peyton finding himself in that process, and figuring it out, was the final piece of the Broncos’ storybook championship-puzzle.

Gary Kubiak said as much, in his post-game presser. His exact words were: “Peyton was the difference for our team.” But the context in which he was speaking was the difficulty that the Sheriff went through this season; the poor play, the injured body, getting benched. Kubiak’s point was that Peyton’s struggle was the embodiment of this team’s spirit, and its rallying cry.

Individual brilliance is a wonderful thing to behold, and certainly one of the major draws for those of us who watch sports. Yeah, I loved watching Von Miller on Sunday, duh, of course I did. What he did, in back-to-back championship games — 5 sacks, two forced fumbles and an interception— constitutes perhaps the greatest single performance by a defensive player in the history of the league. Seriously, an argument can be made. When the pressure was as big as it gets, Von wasn’t just a star, he went supernova. And of course, I loved watching it.

But what I loved even more, was hearing everything he said after the game was over.

“I’ve definitely had my struggles and it was because of my teammates, my family, Mr. Elway…all these guys that never really quit on me and kept believing in me that got me to this moment where I am today,” Miller said. “Comparisons, they make me uncomfortable. A lot of legendary guys have come before us, Hall of Fame guys that put their backs on the line and changed the game to what it is now. We played great, and I’m proud of every last one of my guys. We started the season like that, and it feels good when you set a goal and you’re able to finish it. If I could cut this award up and give it to DeMarcus, Wolfe, all those other guys, that’s what I would do,” Miller said. “I’ll take the ring.”

I’ll take the ring.

I loved this Broncos team because they played with such heart and fire, and because that fire came from the understanding that they were all playing for each other. The microcosm of Peyton’s struggle became the macrocosm of the entire team. The season-long process of realizing that everyone had a job to do, and that the only way to achieve the goal was for everyone to do their job. No more, and no less.

It’s a cliche, to a certain extent. But it’s also a cliche that: a) sits at the heart of why team sports hold such a central place in the American cultural landscape, and b) is, in actuality, so rarely achieved.

All this is not to Cam- or Panther-bash. I really enjoyed watching the Panthers this year, and they certainly embodied a lot of the same team-first principles. But then again, it’s a little hard to ignore the symbolic reality of that me-first gesture in the whole Superman thing, the idea that it can all rest on one person’s shoulders.

And this year’s Broncos, and this year’s Peyton, represented the exact negation of that. Peyton was the original Superman, for basically his entire career. He was the hero, expected to conquer the world without fail, and bashed for his inability to do so. Two years ago, as we all recall, the Broncos went to the Super Bowl with that model, and got destroyed. This year, the hero went through struggles like he’d never gone through before. And in that process, he learned to subvert all his instincts as a player, everything he’d been trained to do as the star; and instead, find himself as just one node of the constellation.

That’s what Kubiak meant, when he said “Peyton was the difference for our team.” And the way the story unfolded, over the course of the season, was just narrative letter-perfect. The exact mid-season point at which the Sheriff crumbled. The way in which the team subsequently learned it could, in fact, win without him. The return, in the last game of the year; a game in which, after the offense turned the ball over 5 times, Kubiak couldn’t not put Peyton back in, it was his head-coaching responsibility and obligation at that point to make the switch. And to see, in Peyton’s return to the field, that he had changed the way he played the game. That he had learned to accept who he had become, and who the team had become around him.

The most important play in the game yesterday was a two-yard gain. It was midway through the 4th-quarter, with the Broncos holding onto that 16–10 lead. With the ball on their own 26 yard-line, 3rd-and-nine. As the play-clock wound down, Peyton stepped up and audibled, hunched back down under center. Took the snap, and handed off to CJ Anderson, for that aforementioned two-yard gain. No hero ball here. Hand it off, do your job, ask the same of everyone else on your team. The Broncos punted, and two plays later Von knocked the ball out of Newton’s hand, the Broncos pounced on it. A few plays after that CJ Anderson scored from a yard out, and Manning fired a nice little dart for the 2-pt conversion. The score was suddenly 24–10, and the game was essentially over.

It’s funny how many people predicted a Panthers victory, how almost no one saw this coming. Even with that pre-game stat being bandied about, how much success top-ranked defenses have had in Super Bowls; having won eight in ten Super-Bowl opportunities, and also with such a clear and recent example available, from that Broncos-Seahawks game from just two years prior. But everyone was blinded by the hero-light, by the quarterback they thought Cam was, and by the quarterback they thought Peyton wasn’t.

The Panthers never really had a chance, though. As a team they knew, at best, that they were playing in the Super Bowl; that was the extent of their knowledge heading into the game. But the Broncos, as a team, knew why they were playing in the Super Bowl. They were a narrative freight-train about what a team is — and why that concept is so important in American life — gathering full-steam at just the right moment.

And as a Broncos fan, I want to say thank you to this team, for embodying the ideals I hold up when I make that choice to emotionally invest myself in what you do. Thank you to modest, plainspoken Gary Kubiak, for emphasizing the grind and keeping a firm hand on the tiller through rough seas. To Peyton Manning, for struggling and finding his way. To Wade Phillips, for putting the trust in his players to play the game. To Von Miller, for becoming the player his team needed him to become, and doing it for the ring, and understanding what that means. I could name the rest of you, dear Broncos, and moments you all gave me during the course of the season, too. Thanks for all the memories, it was a glorious roller-coaster all the way to the end of the line. Good job Broncos. Great job Broncos. Fantastic super-duper championship job, Broncos. May they run wild and free across the plains with their manes streaming out behind them, always.