The Awakening – A Philly Sports Story
“Love changes everything – how you live and how you die.” Aspects of Love, anyone? And going with the theme: Love changes your perspective — how you see your father embrace a city and how you choose to take a stand, too.
On Valentine’s Day, I’m reminded that love appears in unexpected places, far beyond candy hearts, roses, and love songs.
This Philly sports story began for me after the Eagles won the Super Bowl and we watched the post-game interviews.
Reflections Across Time
During the 2025 Super Bowl celebrations, I watched Saquon Barkley’s young daughter maintain her quiet composure.
I saw myself forty years ago—another young girl trying to navigate her place in a public sports moment.
What will the daughter of Barkley say about this experience in 2067? Will she, like me, look back and realize you don’t separate yourself from history as it unfolds around you?
Born Into Love – Our Valentine’s Legacy
Some, like Wali Jones, born on Valentine’s Day itself, showed us early that love means taking a stand. “You’re an activist on the day you’re born,” he tells us. “To be active is to be alive.”
He transformed from a 1967 Sixers champion into something far more significant – a living example of how love for community can reshape a city’s heart.
Love in Waiting
Following the Eagle’s 2025 Super Bowl win, I found myself doing what I’ve done for forty years–rewinding, pausing, replaying these moments, just as my Dad used to study game tapes. But, where he analyzed to prepare for action, I’ve been stuck in observation mode since 1983, watching and re-watching, trying to understand my place in that victory parade.
Lessons from 1983
These scenes echo across four decades, teaching me something I couldn’t grasp as that preteen girl in 1983: championships aren’t just about the game.
They’re about fathers showing their children how to win with grace, how to comfort someone when emotions become overwhelming, how to let joy ripple through an entire city, how to turn personal triumph into collective celebration.
Back then, Moses Malone, Julius Erving, and Bobby Jones brought their families to those historic moments, and my father had us—his children—right there with him. He always said family meant more than any championship, and he meant it. My sister and I always felt it.
The Quiet Moment
There’s a moment in time that captures this perfectly—one I’ve revisited on YouTube: That Championship Feeling.
While everyone else was celebrating wildly in the champagne-soaked locker room, my father noticed a teammate, overwhelmed with emotion, sitting alone undercover in a dark corner.
Dad walked over and spoke to him in that gentle, calming voice he used with me when things got too tough—the voice that made any storm feel manageable.
That’s the seed of something bigger – how a father’s love for his children grows into love for his player, his team, his community like a founding father’s love for his city.
Celebration’s Echo
The joy was everywhere that day—in Andrew Toney’s breathless admission that he “didn’t even know I had feet” when the buzzer sounded, in the playful interviews between celebrating teammates, and in the way victory transformed these fierce competitors into a family sharing their triumph.
Today, Eagles players create similar situations with their own children, writing new chapters in Philadelphia’s ongoing love story with its teams.
When Love Breaks Free
Perhaps that’s what I’ve been trying to understand since 1983, sitting in the back of that championship float, watching my father’s love ripple out from family to teammates to an entire city.
While Wali taught us to be “active on the day you’re born,” I’ve spent decades as an observer, holding these memories close but never quite claiming them as my own, until now.
Faith and Family
When I heard Jalen Hurts first acknowledge God in his victory speech, it reminded me how faith and family have always been woven into Philadelphia’s sports story.
It reminded me of the Kelce brothers’ mother during the 2023 “Kelce” Super Bowl, wearing that now-famous half-Eagles, half-Kansas City jacket—a perfect symbol of how love transcends competition.
Like her, God doesn’t choose sides. Victory or defeat, love remains constant.
The same spirit of family extending beyond blood ties shows in players like A.J. Brown. He brought the Vince Lombardi trophy to visit a boy in the hospital. The ten-year-old boy was injured protecting his sister during the North Philadelphia plane crash.
Full Circle
Win or lose, the Eagles have already taught us what the 76ers showed me in this Philly sports story so long ago – that love reigns over it all.
It’s in the quiet moments after the confetti falls, when a father buries his face in his child’s shoulder, when a daughter maintains her composure during a milestone moment, when a city comes together to celebrate not just victory but the love that makes victory meaningful.
It’s taken me four decades to stop watching from the sidelines, to understand that these moments weren’t just my father’s or the city’s – they were mine too.
And so, on Valentine’s Day, this is my love letter to Philadelphia, my way of finally stepping into the active love that Wali Jones has been teaching us about all along.
Your Love Letter
When did you first feel that deep connection – to a team, a city, a relationship, a moment bigger than yourself? It doesn’t have to be about sports. Share your love letter in the comments below.
This story doesn’t stand alone. It floats in a snow globe of memories with two other tales of Philly love. These muses are always here to shake love up again.