Houston Hosted What May Be The Greatest Super Bowl Of All Time

Early in the third quarter, the Patriots fans at NRG Stadium sat with their hands on their heads, elbows out, while the Falcons fans in the room chanted “rise up” and sang Migos songs. Atlanta had just gone up 28-3, and Tom Brady—the greatest quarterback of all time—looked like his legacy could be tarnished. The biggest question in the stadium, and in living rooms across the country, was whether Matt Ryan, who was in the middle of delivering the best Super Bowl performance any quarterback ever had, deserved to be the game’s MVP, or if it should be defensive tackle Brady Jarrett, who was closing in on his third sack of Brady.

Of course, then things turned on a dime. The Patriots clawed their way back into the game, hitting a touchdown—but missing the extra point, bringing a wave of giggles to a stadium that saw a 28-9 lead no less indestructible than being up by 25—and then another field goal. Even then, a two-possession game with six minutes to play didn’t send NRG Stadium into “how is this happening” mode. The fans in red and black would have loved to see their team put more points on the board, but the celebratory mood from the first half was hard to puncture.

Live football is different from football on TV in that way: they say that the game is built for television, and they’re right in a few ways, but chief among them is that watching on TV transforms this three-plus hour game full of stops and starts into a narrative. The story is told to TV audiences in that time by announcers, experts, and sideline reporters. It’s told through shots of the tears on the eyes of the Patriots fan who had thought his team left for dead, who thought, “I paid $1,700 for a ticket to watch this” before realizing that there’s life left in Tom Brady’s battered bones yet. True students of the game may have realized by observing the Falcons’ defense that they stopped pressuring Brady and let him pick the team apart, but for many people the turnaround looked like magic.

And in a way, it was. The fifty previous Super Bowls had been settled in regulation, but this one required overtime. Once it got there, and the Patriots won the coin toss, anybody who hadn’t retired from making predictions with six minutes left to play in the fourth quarter had to have felt confident that this would be—yet again—Tom Brady and Bill Belichick’s night.

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