I am a huge New England Patriots fan. I was born just west of Boston, Massachusetts and even though I no longer live in New England, the Patriots will always be my team in my heart. My mother and father imparted to me a love of the game of football, and a deep loyalty to the Patriots, in good years and bad.

This was supposed to be a good year. Somehow right now, it feels worse than the year they went 1-15.

I’ve been quietly sitting here licking my wounds for the past few days, mulling over the idea of perfection and setbacks and what it all means. I’d written as much of a post as I could muster about stumbling along the way vs losing it all at the end on the heels of the Patriots superbowl defeat, but then BeThisWay published her excellent post about life lessons and what we could learn from the superbowl this year, so I’m going to take a slightly different tack.

For those uninitiated in the ways of football, the Patriots went undefeated in the regular season, and with a win in the superbowl would have become only the second team in NFL history to have a perfect record. But then they lost to the underdog Giants, and now they are simply another 18-1 team, but without even a superbowl win. As my mother always says, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, so almost perfect doesn’t mean all that much right now. For the Patriots. The Giants were far from perfect in the regular season, and that doesn’t matter any more either, because they won the superbowl, and are now the champions. I don’t think there is a Patriots fan out there that wouldn’t trade the perfect regular season of the Patriots with the superbowl win of the Giants. I know I would.

There are those who say that if the Patriots had lost a game or two along the way, they’d be the champions right now. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it appeals to my sense of logic. Being perfect is a lot of pressure in and of itself, and without the pressure of perfection, the Patriots might have managed to play better in the superbowl and walk away with the win. I know firsthand about the pressures of perfection, for I am a perfectionist through and through. When I went through my recent car repair saga, I let myself get really worked up about having to finance part of the repair bill. Honestly, it felt like I’d irrevocably failed. I know that isn’t true, and I know it is just one setback along the road to achieving debt freedom, but the use of credit really got under my skin and into my brain. I was really attached to being able to say I hadn’t used credit since 2003. We’d had many setbacks in the past four+ years of concentrating on debt reduction, but we’d always managed to avoid increasing our debt totals. Until now.

But unlike the Patriots, this isn’t the end of my journey. There is loads of debt reduction ahead of me, and I’ll recover from this setback and move forward past it before you know it. But does it matter that I’m in the middle and not at the end? What if this was the end? What if I was already debt free and then had to go back into debt because of some sort of huge financial setback?

Then I’d be the Patriots, and I’d start over. This isn’t the end for them either, it is just the start of the next try for perfection. Or at least, a superbowl win. It feels awful right now, but in a few short months, it all resets, and we try again. And that’s the life lesson I’m trying to internalize. Nothing’s forever, nothing is set in stone, and we all can only do the best we can and recover gracefully from our defeats and move forward. What happens next is the true mark of what this team is, and I hope they’re as good an example as I expect them to be. I could use a few lessons on recovering gracefully from defeat myself.

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