This week Bryce Harper gave a hint that Dancing On My Own might be coming back to the Phillies clubhouse. The anthem of the 2022 and 2023 playoff runs has been absent for the trying-to-be-more-professional Phillies, but whatever works with them is fine with me. The reason I bring it up is that my own memory of the song is actually tied to an Eagles game (plus Robyn’s version is the best version btw). It got me thinking about the times that sports made me feel things for better and for worse. I figured I’d get them on paper and ask for people to send their own memories beyond just winning and losing the game.
October 16, 2022: Eagles 26 – Dallas 17
My Eagles friends and I are spread out across the country now, so we do our best to get to one Eagles game per season to get together. For the 2022 season, it was home against the Cowboys for Sunday Night Football. It was Dallas, the Eagles were 5-0, and the Phillies just so happen to be going on their run and had eliminated the Braves the day before. The mood in the parking lot before the game was completely unlike any I had ever experienced, everyone was in a great mood. Even my Cowboys fan friend walked the lots without incident (he’s a pro). After the Eagles won, the good vibes continued with every car stuck in traffic blasting Dancing On My Own and waves of people singing along. It’s hard to describe just how good that felt.
October 14, 2022: Phillies 9 – Braves 1 (NLDS Game 5)
Look, that weekend was a great one, so I have to go back to the well one more time. Coming up for the Eagles game was only part of the reason to be there that weekend. One friend was having a surprise party on the 15th but my niece had also been born a few months earlier and I hadn’t seen her yet. As you are going to see, I am a huge believer in good sports karma, so I made it a point to not watch the game that night. Phillies and Braves were 1-1 and it was the first playoff game at Citizen’s Bank Park in 11 years. That might was about seeing my niece. My brother is not a sports fan so it’s not like the game was on and I didn’t say anything. We sat outside by a fire, caught up, and the Phillies didn’t come up once. Of course, my phone buzzed and buzzed after the Hoskins bat spike and demolition of Spencer Strider, but other than a glance here and there, I didn’t check it until the night ended. I missed a great game but got to meet my niece. You’re welcome!!!
May 29, 2010: Phillies 1 – Marlins 0 (Roy Halladay’s Perfect Game)
This was also the night of Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Flyers and Blackhawks. I watched that game and Halladay make history from the bar at the Parker House with my friends. This is not a happy memory. Why? Because the Phillies were playing the Marlins that night in Miami, the city I live in!!! At that pre-kids time in my life, I would go to every Phillies-Marlins game, all 9, every year. My friends convinced me to come up to the Shore for Memorial Day weekend that year. The whole time at the bar I kept muttering, “I’m supposed to be there” because I KNEW my lack of attendance meant it was going to be something special. Of course, it was. Obviously, it is still a great memory, but damnit I should have been at a perfect game!
October 13, 2024: Eagles 20 – Browns 16
I’m a pretty level-headed fan comparatively. I’m never going to throw anything or yell at my TV, but at the end of the first half of this game, I lost my shit. The Eagles were 2-2 after 4 uninspiring weeks of football, coming off an early bye, and I was firmly in the camp that not firing Nick Sirianni was a mistake that would sink the team. Then Jake Elliot had his 50-yard field goal blocked and returned for a TD. The score was tied at 10, but this was the lowly Browns and the season was over in my head. Did I mention the Phillies had just lost a profoundly annoying playoff series to the Mets? Well, I was done being a clown (even though what was about to happen was clearly clown behavior). I found myself a box, went to my closet, and put away all my sports stuff. My hats, jerseys, shirts, it all went in the box. I refused to watch the rest of the game too (though I did get score alerts on my phone). The Eagles won, so clearly the box had to stay in the closet.
February 9, 2025: Eagles 40 – Chiefs 22 (Super Bowl 59)
This day was great for a lot of reasons, but three stand out. First, I absolutely knew we weren’t just going to win but we were going to whip their ass. I wrote about it ahead of time, that we were better than them in literally every way and were going to break them like Bane did to Batman. Second, the sequence of plays in the second quarter that went sack, sack, Cooper DeJean pick 6 had me bloodthirsty and ravenous yelling at my screen “HIT HIM AGAIN, HIT HIM AGAIN!!!” I’ve never felt like that before. Finally, though the game had been over since “The Dagger”, once they finally dumped the Gatorade on Sirianni, I figured it was time. I went to my closet and opened the box from above. I didn’t touch it all year after that Browns game. The box went 16-1, with only that no Jalen Hurts, no CJGJ Washington loss to blemish its sterling record.
October 23, 1993 and 2008: Phillies 6 – Blue Jays 8 and Phillies 2 – Rays 4 (Two World Series Losses Exactly 15 Years Apart)
I don’t have a lot of sports memories with my dad but here are two that were bad at the time, but are completely different looking back. The first game is Joe Carter’s HR. The PFO family was on a road trip to Niagara Falls at the time and we watched the game from a tiny hotel room. I was 10 years old and when Carter hit that HR, I bawled my eyes out. My dad hugged me and, even though he had to be pretty pissed off himself, told me it was going to be ok. He was completely wrong, but that’s what little me needed to hear. Flash forward 15 years and the Phillies were playing the Rays in the World Series in Tampa and his friend had two tickets for us. He flew down from New Jersey, I drove up from Miami and we got to watch the Phillies lose. Despite being 25 now, I was a wreck after the game and was moaning, “we’re gonna lose” over and over. Well, in perfect dad mode, he stopped me and put his hand’s on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes and told me, “They are going to win.” This time, he was completely right.
February 4th, 2018: Eagles 41 – Patriots 33 (Super Bowl 52)
The game is mostly a blur of anxiety and euphoria and even though I have visions of the Philly Special, the strip sack, the final Hail Mary seemingly lasting forever, and running outside my house and screaming, my clearest memory of the day was waking up in the morning. I knew we were going to win and it scared the hell out of me. What the hell was I doing feeling confident? This was obviously a sign we were definitely losing. I tried running, talking to people, and even yard work to try to put the notion out of my head. I couldn’t shake it. This wasn’t like SB59 years later where we were clearly the better team, we were not. It didn’t matter. What an idiot I was, allowing myself to get my hopes up all day. Then, the Patriots came out to Crazy Train and I knew I was right.1
October 27th to 29th, 2008: Phillies 4 – Rays 3 (World Series Game 5)
At no point during the 2008 season did I believe the Phillies were winning the World Series. That would be ludicrous. I certainly didn’t believe it after the Game 2 loss and my father’s assurances above and even up 3 games to 1 with Cole Hamels on the mound I just never believed it could happen. My girlfriend and now wife at the time was completely confident the whole time. What did she know though? She hadn’t been scarred her whole life by these teams. We were going to find a way to lose in the worst possible way. Then with the Phillies up 2-1 in the decisive game, it started raining, the Rays tied it up, and they finally postponed it. Here we go. This was how it was going to happen. With Cole cruising and only at 75 pitches, of course God was going to intervene and take this from us. I barely slept that night. In school the next day I was morose. My professors didn’t call on me at all. They knew. Hell, everyone knew. I’m usually a talker and I was not talking. I had a thousand-mile stare if my eyes were open at all. I could barely function. All of Tuesday and until game time Wednesday were just lost to time. I was a mess. Then we took the lead, lost the lead, and took it back only for the source of so much anxiety and perfection to take the mound to try to win it, Brad Lidge. I stood in front of my TV the whole second half of Game 5 but was about 2 feet away the whole top of the 9th clinging to a 4-3 lead. When the final strike went past Eric Hinske and into the mitt of Carlos Ruiz, I crumpled to my knees and closed my eyes exhausted. With my hands raised in the air, I opened my eyes and saw Lidge in the exact same pose I was in. My future wife looked at me and said, “I told you!” Then asked me what I wanted to do? I said I want to spray some beers to celebrate. “So do it!” she replied. I went on my balcony and shook up some bottles and sprayed them everywhere including all over myself. It was the best feeling in the world.2
- Side story from this game. Before my Dad died, he got way caught up in the Trump wave and swore off the NFL that season. I would call him and try to get him to talk about the Eagles but then he would just start ranting so I gave up after a few weeks. He missed one of the best seasons ever. I didn’t know until after the game that he watched the Super Bowl. He called me and he was happy and we just talked about how great the game was, nothing else. He passed away about a year later. I’m glad we had that. ↩︎
- I’m sure there are more too, but that seems like a great place to end ↩︎
Photo: Edg126, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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