Sunday Essays #7: Believing in Things Is So Back.
and it feels really good.
The players had hardly gotten back to their respective locker rooms after this year’s Super Bowl LX when I noticed that all of my group chats were expressing the same sentiment:
“It just didn’t feel like the Super Bowl this year.”
That’s a startling statement at first glance, but when you break it down, it begins to make a lot of sense.
The Super Bowl used to be a primary source of entertainment in America.
A shared living room that spanned the entire country.
Even if your team wasn’t involved, it was a pure, unmissable spectacle.
Since then, so much has changed- and we know what a lot of that is.
You’ve got platforms on platforms- your dopamine plate overflowing with all of the short form content your heart could desire.
Couple that with an attention span so fried that you stop two or three times to peruse the FYP in the middle of signing up for your umpteenth streaming service, and the bigger problem becomes pretty clear.
The Modern “Big Game”
Massive sporting events used to be about camaraderie and shared experience.
In 2026, that’s really not the case.
Modern sporting events have now basically become investment vehicles.
The plethora of prop bets and parlays overshadow rooting interest.
As with anything else, they’re also injected with cultural division and controversy, as seen by this year's halftime show.
We’ve touched on that- and people find this constant loop of division exhausting.
There’s also the war we must go to with our subconscious, which knows all too well about the elephant in the room:
Watching sports in the present day is inefficient.
A close friend of mine is crazy about the NBA.
He tells me that the average NBA Twitter loudmouth doesn’t even watch the games.
I was pretty puzzled by this and naturally pushed back, so he explained it:
“They don’t watch the games. They watch the highlights on Twitter and TikTok and talk shit based off of that.”
I trust my boys implicitly, but if you don’t, that’s cool- here’s the exact same sentiment being expressed by famed Barcelona defender Gerard Pique when questioned on the same topic, in application to football:
“Watching Football for 90 minutes isn’t exciting anymore. Football competes with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok. Everyone has limited time.”
“Do I watch matches for 90 minutes? Not really. I watch Barça play, but not 90 minutes. Maybe 30 or 40 minutes.”
Our big moments have become commoditized, clipped, condensed, and culturally impactful for the wrong reasons.
The biggest casualty of all of this?
They lose meaning.
This was looking pretty bleak from the outside looking in, as if one of our biggest cultural mainstays- the passion and togetherness primetime sports provide- was an endangered species.
All it took was two weeks in Milan to change all that.
The U.S. Men’s Hockey Team Did More Than Win Gold
The entire country was enraptured by Team USA’s quest for their first Olympic gold medal since the 1980 Miracle on Ice year.
Also, before we go any further with them, let’s get some disclaimers outta the way:
The U.S. Women’s team beat Canada and won gold and they’re total badasses in my eyes (and pretty much everyone else’s), too.
People who are sad and miserable will always latch onto whatever big moment they can as a vehicle for being…sad and miserable.
Outrage culture’s gross, slimy tentacles are seriously starting to lose their grip on American culture (this is a beautiful thing).
Okay, anyway.
Leading up to the gold medal game, I couldn’t help but notice that the overall feeling- in group texts, in conversations, in the media, IRL- felt like old times.
Nobody was talking about “Quinn Hughes Over 2.5 points” or pucklines or player props.
(Though I do have to brag that our hero won the Bucci Overtime Challenge)
There was excitement, pride in the air.
There was the juxtaposition of the very familiar “we are the USA and we’re here to dominate” bravado, alongside the rather alien feeling of being underdogs on an international stage.
Group chats were alight with anticipation.
Social media was chock full of both the wholesome (players’ family and friends having watch parties, rocking their USA gear to work) and the less wholesome (absolutely hilarious memes that often crossed the line).
There was belief.
There was meaning.
So when Jack Hughes, all 165 pounds of him, broken smile and all, tucked a shot under Jordan Binnington early into OT to win it all?
Euphoria ensued.
There was no talking heads yapping about “player legacies”, no arguments about whether certain players were only successful in certain systems, or how they compare to others, etc.
It was just pure, elated pandemonium.
People danced, celebrated, poured beer on each other’s heads.
Bars that had been granted exemptions to host the game at the time of the unholy early Sunday morning puck drop exploded into jubilation.
I remember watching a documentary about the 2004 Boston Red Sox, another legendary (albeit stomach-turning for LI-bred Yankees fan) team.
Once they finally crossed the Rubicon, the reaction of the fans interviewed wasn’t to gloat or be toxic.
They called family members, sometimes for the first time in a long time.
They shared the moment with friends, or reflected on what it meant to the people in their lives who didn’t make it to see this moment.
It was nice to see this phenomenon return en masse.
Take the Momentum and Run With It
2004 might as well be 50 years ago the way we’ve changed culturally since then.
For a fleeting Sunday morning in February, the old world was back.
Amidst all the noise and distractions and craziness, Team USA’s run allowed us to just be….there.
There was no multitasking, no wagers, no clipping, no BS.
We were all sat on the same emotional rollercoaster, a collective ball of nervousness, excitement, and investment wrapped into one.
We were pulled out of our algorithms, our feeds, our preconceived notions and whatever else- and reached the conclusion that we had been starving for a moment like this as a collective for a really long time.
Sure, on the surface it was a really big hockey game.
On a deeper layer, a moment like this unearthed something greater:
The game meant something.
The feeling of belief was rewarded by unbridled joy, and Americans got a taste of this and decided that they loved it.
I’d like to think it’s a sign of things to come.
That’s something to believe in.
-John Abbate
3.1.2026