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I choose to believe this game will propel us into next season and we will be better from it. -
By TylerDurden · Posted
While I agree and share the sentiment, I feel that a lot more post-our Super Bowl runs. I didn’t want to get too Debbie Downer in my initial post, but I’ve said elsewhere here before ad nasueam, and it’s why I get so frustrated with the “well, there’s always next year” crowd, because football is the sport that requires the greatest investment of time, energy, resources for the smallest return. Basketball is 15 guys, 82 games. Baseball is 26 guys for 162 games. Football is 53 guys for 17 games. It’s not even close. You wait about 9 months for 3 months, which either culminates in an entire year of fandom feeling like a complete waste and an exercise in masochistic agony, or complete and utter bliss. Rarely anywhere in between. And the offseason always feels so much longer than the active season. When you really think about it, the reward is not worth the investment UNLESS you win it all. And each time we got to the Super Bowl and as soon as I knew we lost, my first thought was “damn, I don’t know if we’ll ever get this chance again.” And further to that point, again, I was trying to focus on the positives, but the number of fans even just here at the huddle who have passed from season to season and never got to see that “next season…” it just sucks. It’s why, much like life, you have to really savor living in the moment and in football, you REALLY have to hope your team has their poo together every year. It’s why that go-him, conservative las All that being said, it’s why that laissez faire approach to fandom has always pissed me off and I don’t have any patience for it. Carpe fuging diem. Every day. Every year. My cousin was a huge Panthers fan too. He was 36 in 2024, had a dull ache in his stomach for a couple weeks, went to the ER to get it checked out thinking he just had an upset stomach, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died within 5 months or so of his diagnosis. His sister, my other cousin, now lives in GA, and even she posted how excited he would’ve been to see us beat the Falcons like we did this season. And for all of those reasons, despite my criticisms, I’m proud of our team. I always hope for the playoffs but did not expect us to actually make them considering the cold streak we’ve been in for the last 8 years. At times, it felt like we’d never be back. And as I said, the Super Bowl losses really depressed me because all I could think of was that time investment. All of those players. All of those months. All of those battles. And you get as far as you can possibly get to stretch out a season and to lose is complete agony, because if you don’t win it all, you may as well have never made it out of the wild card. So now, my goal is the playoffs every year. It really always has been. If we can do that, we are competitive and always have a chance to make a run. That doesn’t seem as far away as the Super Bowl… so in this case, where we were playing with house money in a position may felt we shouldn’t have even been in in the first place, we showed up and competed. Now we just need to build off of this and I’m happy because if it was just making the playoffs this year, getting better means winning in the playoffs next year. That’s the goal. So, while I’m not taking it for granted, I’m believing that will be the case. -
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