From Backyard Snow Games to Highmark Stadium: The Magic of Football

It was snowing, windy, and 29 degrees. In most circumstances, this would entail a night on a couch in front of a fireplace, drinking steaming hot chocolate under a blanket while watching your favorite movie for the seventh time. But not at Highmark Stadium. 70,437 Bills fans watched for three hours and fourteen minutes in these conditions, watching as their beloved Bills decimated the powerhouse that is the San Francisco 49ers, 35 to 10. Now don’t get me wrong, the game was amazing. Josh Allen delivered on a primetime performance with a touchdown of every kind in the kind of historic game we’ve come to take for granted with him. And for all the fans there, it must’ve been much more fun to deal with all of that watching a great game from their team while downing beers and horsing around in the stands, instead of having to sit through an awful product like my New York Giants put out every Sunday. But I think there’s a bigger reason why it was such a fun game to be at, even for us with little emotional attachment to the outcome. In the opening drive of the second half, Jauan Jennings caught a 14-yard pass for a first down. But the way he sloshed through the snow, curved the break, and dove for the catch brought me back to my childhood, and playing football in the snow with my family in the backyard. He’s one of the premier athletes in the world, yet he ran his route like that of any random football enthusiast in their yearly Thanksgiving game would. The mystique surrounding these professional athletes makes people forget that while running routes and catching balls is his job, he's still a normal person who would play tackle football during snow days with his friends. That’s why football is so special; why a 60-minute game of grown men hitting each other for an 11-inch ball can make these tens of thousands of people jump around in the freezing cold. Because the game creates a community, with shared moments that people of all levels experience at one time or another throughout their lifetimes. Every person sitting in that stadium has slipped their way through a route like Jauan, or tackled someone like Fred Warner, or gone off script for a flea-flicker like Amari Cooper and Josh Allen did. And that’s the allure of the game; no matter what happens in your life, when you step into that stadium, everybody has one and the same wish: play some football.