An exhilarating experience in time that I encountered last night was during the final two minutes of Super Bowl LII. I and my roommate, Kate, were rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles and the two boys sitting behind us were rooting for the New England Patriots. There was so much tension in the air, and I could feel the passage of every second. Kate and I inched closer to the edges of our seats with every down, and one of the boys behind us got up and started pacing around the room in small, tight circles. It was interesting because during the actual game, I hadn’t felt time moving any differently than regularly, but in that moment, it felt as though the past hours of the game had passed at double speed. Even though the game only had two minutes left on the clock, those two minutes took longer than two minutes to play out, as often happens at the end of intense sports games. This made the way time felt even weirder, because it was almost as though I was occupying a space in limbo, where time was passing for me but it was not passing for the players or anybody at the game.
The time in the actual game was operating on a different timeline that did not have to bow to the laws of the natural world; time could stop and start as plays ended and teams could take “time-outs” and literally step outside of game time to confer with each other about how best to spend the rest of their time. Everybody was counting the seconds with tapping toes or pacing steps or sharp intakes of breath, and then when the last second finally ticked down and the game was over, it was just like another moment had ended. We all stood, looking at the TV where the players were going absolutely mad. It was as if the minor transmission delay between Minnesota and the Sellinger VIP Lounge TV made it so that, even though time was passing for us before it passed for the players, we were behind on the celebration. For a moment that seemed slightly too long, nobody celebrated or exclaimed in defeat. We watched the players cheer, and then after a minute or so, we were shot with a burst of adrenaline and started screaming and running around the room.
It also felt as though we were occupying a different space in time because those last two minutes of the Super Bowl came with a code of conduct that Kate, the two Patriots fans, and I seemed to implicitly be following while our two non-football fan friends were not. Rules such as not ‘jinxing it’ by saying anything like, “the Eagles have it,” or “Tom Brady is done” or not looking at each other or not making any sound in general other than in reaction to the game, all increased the pressure that the football fans in Sellinger VIP felt during that time. The two non-fans, however, were openly joking and making ‘jinx’ statements because they thought the pressure we felt was funny, and they viewed our insistence on their silence as an overreaction; they weren’t existing in the same pressurized two-minutes-but-not-two-minutes that we were. It made me think about the players and coaches in the stadium. Kate commented, “I could never be able to stay calm like that as a player, I don’t understand how they’re doing it” and I realized it was true. The players seemed focused and in a headspace outside the passing time, much the way I have felt before during regattas for crew. Time must have been, I imagine, passing even more slowly for the teams in the game, who could be measuring the passage of time in downs, yards, and plays instead of seconds and minutes, like those watching on TV.
It seemed that the Super Bowl created a set of different timelines all occurring parallel; the fans, those who did not care at all, the players and coaches, and those watching on TV from different cities and states. We were all feeling the pressure and stretching out of each moment in different ways, but we were all braided together by this common experience. For the players, the moment that the Eagles won will become a marker of time in their life, a point at which to measure time passing from, “it has been a week since I won the Super Bowl” and later "it has been a year since I won the Super Bowl." I found it profoundly interesting to reflect back on all the different timelines occurring parallel but not simultaneously during the hours that the game took place. It points to the way that our different experiences of a singular event, while they braid us together, also separate us from each other.
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