Maybe Next Year
Full Disclosure: I am a Cleveland Browns fan. (If you didn’t already know.) I went from 1996-1998 without my favorite team because they were moved to Baltimore, and the team hasn’t been the same ever since. So all due respect, any other NFL fanbase can get out of here with their woe stories. But honestly, every fanbase has their down moments, where they felt like no other fanbase could understand their pain. I’m an Atlanta Falcons fan, also. Needless to say, few fanbases can understand the pain of 28-3, even one who didn’t have a team for three years. Then again, the Browns had The Drive and The Fumble in back-to-back conference championships, so maybe they can.
“Maybe Next Year” begins with a montage setting up the mindset of Philadelphia Eagles fans going into the 2017 season. We hear clips from radio shows and people from the documentary to come talking about how Philadelphia’s status as one of the great cities has been lost for a while, how the Eagles drive the city. We’ve heard plenty about the wild nature of Eagles fans- Hell, the Oscar-winning “Silver Linings Playbook” had it as part of their storyline- but this film takes us deep into the weeds with the fans as they go through that 2017 season, which would end with the team defeating the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII. Honestly, what we see in Kyle Thrash’s documentary doesn’t seem extraordinarily off the beaten path for sports fandom; search the Browns hashtag on Twitter, and you’ll see similar antics on the reg.
Thrash’s film isn’t to simply show that Eagles fans are the best or most downtrodden fanbase in sports, though- literally most fanbases could have such a documentary made about them. “Maybe Next Year” is about the ebbs and flows of an NFL season from a fan’s perspective, seeing how the highs can make you euphoric and, sometimes, irrationally emotional, while the lows can spiral you into a deep depression and, sometimes, irrationally emotional. We see a woman calling into sports radio, and proceeding to go completely against her natural personality to make her point. We see a security guard with a YouTube channel, and the ways his persona online is different from his real-life, and some of the ways it bleeds out from his personal confidence. We see a retired couple where the wife allowed the husband to make an Eagles shrine so they could watch the games every week, rather than retiring in Florida as planned. We hear from a son taking care of his father with cancer, and how he hopes that, just once before he dies, the father can watch them win the Super Bowl. These are human stories that revolve around sports; all of these people come from different backgrounds, but they share a single passion. Seeing them able to celebrated the highest of highs a football fan can experience is something that is impossible not to appreciate.
