The 7 A.M. Acela out of New York was full of Eagles fans, but it was a little early for revelry. I sat next to a guy in a Carson Wentz jersey who told me that he’d been at the Miracle in the Meadowlands III, when Michael Vick led a fourth-quarter comeback against the Giants in Week 15 of the 2010 season, with DeSean Jackson returning a Giants punt for a walkoff touchdown. Except that the guy had left the game at the beginning of the fourth quarter, disgusted at the Eagles’ play. “DeSean ran it into the corner of the end zone, right where we were sitting,” he said, looking stricken. His lack of faith still crushed him. That’s an Eagles fan.

I was born in Philadelphia, but I grew up across the river, in South Jersey, so for me the Eagles were never exactly Philly’s team. Philadelphia thinks of itself as an underdog among East Coast cities, but from our side of the Delaware Philly was the big town—we were the underdogs.

New Jersey, as Ben Franklin is said to have said, is a barrel tapped at both ends, and that is certainly the case with professional-football loyalties. Having no in-state professional football team of its own, New Jersey fans root for three out-of-state teams, the New York Giants, the New York Jets (both of which play in Jersey), and the Philadelphia Eagles. In southwest Jersey, where I grew up, we are passionate Eagles fans—the word is pronounced to sound like “giggles.” Although “Go Birds!” is favored nowadays, I still hear “Go Iggles!” in my head.

Here is a photograph of me in an Eagles uniform in 1967, age eight, pretending to catch the winning touchdown while my father talks on a telephone behind me. I’d like to think that he’s calling his bookie to make a bet on the big game, the game I will win with the fingertip catch I am in the process of completing. In fact, my father probably cared more about that stylishly coiled telephone cord than he did about football. Perhaps he is wondering just how John, Jr., his oldest son, turned out to worship this funny sport, when he himself didn’t even know the rules. My dad liked to watch me watch games—to marvel at how such an unimportant thing to him could move me to tears. He’d always flinch when I’d scream “Get him!” at the pass rushers, and then shake his head in wonder.

Where did my feeling for the Eagles come from? And what kind of feeling was it? It’s not like my fandom was created out of winning. If anything, it was built on losing, pain, and a lot of cursing of one’s miserable fate as an Eagles fan. Why love that? Later, when I tried to interest my son in the Eagles, he looked at me the way my father had looked at me—like I was nuts. But I seemed to have no choice.

The year after the picture was taken, 1968, I convinced my dad to take me to an Eagles game, then at Franklin Field. It was the same year that Eagles fans pelted Santa Claus with snowballs during the final game, against the Vikings, an event that has become, fifty years later, a part of the Eagle Nation’s identity—a shameful event of which we are perversely proud.

Dad and I went to an earlier game in the 0–11 run with which Coach Joe Kuharich’s team opened the ’68 season, which now seems like the photographic negative of this miracle season. Kuharich, who had committed the unpardonable sin of (foolishly) trading the quarterback Sonny Jurgensen to Washington for Norm Snead, was fired at the end of that season, and later died of a heart attack during the first half of the Eagles’ loss to the Oakland Raiders in the 1981 Super Bowl.

I’d like to think I came to that game as a normal nine-year-old football-crazy kid, but that I left as something else—a bloodied Eagles fan. The fans booed the players almost from the start. At some point, a plane pulling a banner that read “Joe Must Go”* began to circle the stadium, and fans took up that chant—“Joe must go! Joe must go!”—louder and louder as the game neared its dismal conclusion. And I joined in, first quietly, then lustily. My father asked, How could I boo my own team? He wasn’t judgmental—merely perplexed. I was slightly ashamed, but I had connected with something bigger than myself, and I was in awe of it.

Finally, Dad asked if we could leave, and, as we turned to go, I saw someone had hung up a banner that said, “Joe Please Do Us a Favor and Die.” I looked at my father, but he just shrugged, as if to say, “They’re your people, not mine.”

Philadelphia has a long history of parades, though few of them have been for victorious sports teams. The Mummers New Year’s Day parade has been going since 1901, and the Gimbels Thanksgiving Day parade since 1920. As a kid, I longed for a January Eagles Super Bowl parade. Instead, year after year, we watched the vaguely creepy Mummers on TV. It was what you did on New Year’s Day in the greater Philly media market.

Mummers, who figured in yesterday’s festivities, though not in a way they may have appreciated, are among the oldest folk groups in America. Their colorful shimmery and feathered headdresses, stringed instruments and distinctive dance moves are thought to derive from the Swedish and Finnish settlers who preceded the British to the lower Delaware River, in the sixteen-forties. The reason that the city started having Mummers parades in the first place was to prevent drunken Mummers from turning up at peoples’ doors on New Year’s Day, demanding free drinks. A parade, it was thought, would contain these disruptive forces in a public spectacle and performance, and it seems to have worked.

The parade on Thursday in Philadelphia, which drew about seven hundred thousand, was also an attempt to control disruptive forces. It is therefore fitting that Jason Kelce, the Eagles’ All-Pro center, walked the route in a Mummers costume, managing to single-handedly invert, if not pervert, the stately, if bizarre, traditions of Philly Mummery, much to my personal delight and to that of the fans around me. At one point, Kelce was seen on the Jumbotron strolling down Broad Street with an open Bud Light in his hand—just the sort of thing the Mummers parade was organized to prevent. He also commandeered someone’s bicycle to ride for a while. But he achieved Philadelphia sports immortality when, still in his Mummers costume, he commanded the podium at the post-parade ceremony for a four-and-a half-minute speech, one that wrapped up with a peroration that may live as long in Philly history as Rocky Balboa: