One thing you realize if you’re from Philadelphia, and an Eagles fan, and have spent the past few weeks experiencing some combination of disbelief and euphoria, is how many clichés about the experience of finally winning are true. You will fall to the ground at the moment of victory and not know what to do with your arms. You’ll drink and become unruly. You will feel like you have a small but powerful engine hidden somewhere in your chest, where the disappointment used to live. And then there is that old sportswriter standby: Your mind will turn to everyone you ever shared the experience of being a fan with—blood relatives, maybe some of them passed on; long-lost high school friends; bartenders and roommates—and in that beautiful moment, you will all be together again.

For me, it was my sister that I thought of first, my parents second, and then too many others to name. Some of them were people I’ve never even met—beat writers, or former players. Like Connor Barwin, erstwhile Eagle, who gave four years in the prime of his career to the iteration of the team that existed just before this one—the exhilarating, wildly dysfunctional Chip Kelly–coached Eagles, who flew briefly near the sun and then spent much of the subsequent three years on fire. It was Kelly’s avant-garde disaster of a football team that our now Super Bowl–winning coach, Doug Pederson, was brought in to fix.

Barwin—a burly, improbably graceful outside linebacker—survived the regime change but was cut at the end of the last season, a casualty of his expensive contract. Football players change teams all the time. But Barwin had embraced Philadelphia—he lived downtown and often commuted to his job on SEPTA, Philadelphia’s balky public-transit system; his charitable foundation built playgrounds in the same South Philly neighborhoods he was often seen biking through—and Philadelphia had embraced him in return.

One year after his departure, the Eagles won the Super Bowl without him. After Philly cut him, in 2017, he’d signed with the Rams, out here in Los Angeles, and been part of the team’s second season in the city since 1994. Under their new coach, Sean McVay—who, at 32, is only a year older than Barwin himself—they’d made an unlikely playoff run, during which Barwin had played to his typical standard of excellence, contributing a few key sacks and the general good locker-room vibes for which he’s known throughout the league.

I knew he was living out in Malibu, in a house by the ocean, watching the dolphins go by his home in daily disbelief. Barwin was on vacation in New Zealand when the Eagles won. (The day before the game, he’d posted to his Instagram a photo of himself, in Eagles colors, tackling Tom Brady.) I wondered what it was like to have been so close to winning a championship, and ultimately so far away.

And so, after checking in with everyone else in my life, I reached out to him. It had been a few weeks since the Super Bowl at this point. He was back from New Zealand, he said. Come out to the house in Malibu. We could talk about it.

Steven Taylor Steven Taylor

At the weathered gate of his home off the Pacific Coast Highway, he appeared, a giant shirtless man with wet hair and sandals—he’d been in the shower when I’d arrived. Football players, I am here to report, are not like us. Anyway, he put on a shirt, then led me through the house he was renting, to the back porch. Before us the ocean was a low-key dark green. He handed me an espresso. He was sort of between things at the moment, he said.