Oh, the life lessons we can learn from football — even in a year when sports have been so up in the air.
Football is just a game. Sometimes that’s true. But Hollywood seems to recognize the ability of sports to act as a kind of parable for the way we live. Maybe politics should embrace the allegory, too.
The 2019 season was not the best for the Pittsburgh Steelers. We can all acknowledge that. The 8-8 record might be a nice solid “C” in some towns, but in the City of Champions, we expect more.
Even when we talk smack about bad calls, bad coaching decisions and very bad throws, we have a hope in our hearts that is nourished by knowing what the Steelers can do on their best days.
The 2020 season started the way every season should — except for the covid-19 lockdowns and near-empty stadiums. The Steelers won. Again and again and again, the team notched W’s. Eleven in a row. And then three consecutive losses that sucked the air out of the glee.
It made it hard to have much hope on Sunday, and being 17 points behind the Indianapolis Colts didn’t help.
But hope isn’t something you need when things are easy. Hope only matters when everything seems hopeless. In the last quarter, Ben Roethlisberger remembered he can throw, the Steelers found their come-from-behind mojo and posted the biggest rally of coach Mike Tomlin’s tenure. Hello, AFC North champions.
There’s a takeaway there for the rest of 2020. For all of its crazy ups and downs.
Even when the game is going badly, you don’t stop playing until it’s over. Even when you lose this game and the next one and the next, you don’t give up on the rest of the season. You come back in, you watch the game film and you learn from what you did wrong. You practice and you prepare, and, God willing, you do better next time.
And no matter what, you don’t give up hope.
Having hope doesn’t mean you close your eyes and ignore reality. That just leaves you with the feeling Pirates fans have when they realize blind faith can’t overcome management trading away the team’s best player — again. No, it’s about marrying optimism to hard work and smart choices.
It’s a lesson to apply to government and to politics (and let’s remember those are two different things). It can be used with crime and protest, hurricanes and murder hornets. It is definitely the strategy we need with the coronavirus pandemic.
We can’t give up because we are tired. We can’t stop wearing masks because they are unpleasant. We can’t say that because there are vaccines we don’t need to take precautions.
It’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take commitment and hard work, review of what has worked and what hasn’t and adjusting accordingly.
But what will keep people working toward that goal is that same magic element you find in every football game.
Hope.
— The Tribune-Review (TNS)
