Introduction

2017. Holy shit, what a year. It began with Donald Trump replacing Barack Obama in the White House intending to make America great again. The New England Patriots had the greatest comeback in football history, let alone Super Bowl history, against the Atlanta Falcons with former Boston College quarterback Matt Ryan. They were down by 25 points; the actual score is hard to say without feeling like I’m running it into the ground. That was almost halfway through in the third quarter, a total of twenty-three minutes and thirty-one seconds left in regulation and this one, wait for it . . . was the first Super Bowl to go into overtime. It was the fifty-first Super Bowl, Roman numerals LI. Patriots CEO Robert Kraft, after the game, said that it was “unequivocally the sweetest.”

Why was this unequivocally the sweetest? For one, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was suspended for the first four games over “Deflategate,” the supposed scandal in 2015 that honestly was just a bullshit charge over two PSI in a football. A little karmic revenge because Brady—TB12—was thirty-nine at the time and had four fewer games on Ryan. Second was the probability of being down 25 points with a 0.3 per cent chance of winning in the third quarter and overcoming those odds. Third, this was Brady’s seventh appearance and the Patriots’ ninth appearance overall and fifth Super Bowl championship, effectively completing TB12’s very own Infinity Gauntlet. The Patriots had won two years prior in Super Bowl XLIX (49) against the Seattle Seahawks and former New England coach Pete Carroll.

What other big sporting event happened? The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking their 107-year drought. Their president of baseball operations was Theo Epstein, who greatly contributed to ending the Red Sox’ 86-year drought. The Cubs ace was former Red Sox pitcher John Lester, cancer survivor. The connections to Boston were via Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer, and players John Lester, John Lackey, David Ross. The “Hard Luck” playoff losses and a bullshit curse. In 2003 Cubs fans must have felt cursed when a fan interfered in game 6 of the National League Championship Series. The Red Sox curse hit them that year when Grady Little left Pedro in an inning too long and The Yankees crushed their souls in Game seven of the American League Championship Series. These strange coincidences, or karmic connections, are intriguing to me, and as a practicing Buddhist I find that nothing is “coincidence” but is the cosmic phenomenon of cause and effect.

Sports is a great training for life—a place to learn the value of teamwork, usually as a youth. In sports, you have a winner and a loser—cut and dried. There are multitudes of statistics to quantify any activity players do that is considered valuable. There is only one champion per league every year. To non–sports fans, winning a Super Bowl might not seem like much—just an overhyped sporting event. But it’s really beneficial for the whole region the team is in. The playoff run leading up to the event injects a certain energy into both teams’ hometowns. Then comes the elation of winning or the heartbreak of defeat. In Boston we have experienced all of it, but 2017 was something else. Buddhism is about winning and losing, and it’s up to YOU when and how much to compete. Now that you know you’re a Buddha, you can start making causes to experience the winning in your daily life.

InDo Your Job, Part 2, a film about the Patriots’ journey to Super Bowl LI, Pats general manager Bill Belichick emphasizes how they would put in over 120 practices, 120 causes. A major cause they made was the third two-point conversion play that the Patriots worked on during the playoffs. In the Super Bowl they needed that third two-point package because they needed every play to make history. You actually can see the direct causes the Patriots are putting in, and if they do lose, it’s Bill Belichick saying he needs