The Patriots Fifth #BannerWeek Is Making me an Unproductive College Student

By Matthew Cunha

The New England Patriots are set to raise their fifth banner on Thursday night, when they host the Chiefs. The Patriots have been teasing fans with a new setup for the banners at Gillette due to limited space. It has all culminated so far this week with starting the hashtag #BannerWeek on all of the Patriots social media. On Monday, they tweeted out a video of the banner celebration from 2004 and Tuesday they tweeted out pictures of giant sized Lombardi trophies that are going to be used in the celebration along with video from the celebration in 2005.

 

All of this madness is very distracting to a 21-year-old college senior with two part time jobs. When most hours of the day need to be used productively, dealing with this distraction is quite a problem. Instead of reading a textbook like I should have been doing for the large duration of the day, I have been watching old Patriots highlight videos. Seeing the celebrations from 2004 and 2005 made me rewatch those highlights in great detail. The upcoming videos from 2002 and 2015 that are sure to follow will likely do the same. It is impossible to stop myself at this point.

 

The loss of time is made even harder considering that all of my Thursday will be lost. I will be going to Foxboro to watch the Patriots raise their fifth banner. I will be one of those crazy fans booing Goodell and screaming as the Pats celebrate the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. I will be celebrating the greatest quarterback in the history of the game putting to rest any debate of whether or not he was the greatest. I will not get home until the early hours of Friday morning. I will get up and go to class, go produce a radio show, and then go to my other job with all but no hours of sleep. Even with rain in the forecast for the next several days, it’ll all be worth it.

 

If everything was going to plan I would be done with my assignments and responsibilities for the week and still have most of the day on Saturday to rest. This will not be the case if the Patriots keep teasing me with memories of the past. They need to stop getting me riled up for Thursday night. I have also spent a large portion of time just imagining what they were gonna do to celebrate. When I saw that the Patriots asked all fans to be in their seats by 8, my mind went blank of anything important for at least two hours.
As the week progresses I feel more and more like a little kid on the night before Christmas. This experience is gonna be something I will remember for ages. When the Patriots are presumably awful in twenty years, (bound to happen eventually) I will be able to remember a time when the G.O.A.T. graced the field of Gillette as he watched his fifth banner be forever cemented in Patriots history. That memory will forever be engrained my memory and nothing will able to take that away. For the time being, I might be a little on the unproductive side, but in 20 years I’ll remember the Pats fifth #BannerWeek and a couple low grades due to hurried assignments won’t mean a thing.

 

Matthew Cunha is a producer of The Drive, weekdays 4pm to 6pm on 92.9fm The Ticket and streaming live at DriveShowMaine.com. Follow us on Twitter, @DriveShowMaine and “Like Us” on Facebook, Drive Show Maine.