I’m sure other towns can make their claims to sports misery. Cleveland for instance, but they did have the Cavs. It hasn’t been easy being an O’s fan in recent years. The “Washington Football Team” fans deserve acknowledgement for putting up with... whatever that is.

But Philadelphia?

In my sports-awareness lifetime, I’ve had the Phillies in ’80 and ’08, the Birds in ’17 and the Sixers in ’83 (Sadly, I’m too young to remember the Bullies’ Stanley Cups in the 70s). Sure, there were appearances in the big ones, but they always fell short.

No matter the sport, we have to prepare ahead of time for disaster. The Flyers could be winning in February, but we know they’ll peak too soon. Andy Reid could take the Eagles to the doorstep almost every year and leave us wanting one more, and then, when he finally did get them there, they still came up short. Even Buddy Ryan got the Fog Bowl.

But more often, the teams are just terrible. Rich Kotite. Chad Ogea. LaSalle Thompson.

Yet, this year, it was going to be different. Perhaps it was due to the strange depression of our COVID-19 lockdown that we allowed ourselves to be optimistic. That we forgot who we were and allowed ourselves to dream.

Even the Philly sports press, so reliably cynical, waxed poetic about our teams’ chances. The Flyers were an unstoppable offensive machine on its way to the Stanley Cup. The Sixers were built for a deep NBA playoff run. The Phillies were ideally set to take advantage of the 60-game schedule — after all, the season would be done well before the now-traditional September crash, and the Eagles are just a couple seasons removed from the Super Bowl, with so many ingredients still in place.

Would there be enough room on Broad Street for all the socially-distance parades? All this unbridled optimism. Forgive us, we forgot ourselves.

The Sixers soon revealed themselves as the same team — Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons and the expensive hodge-podge of mismatched pieces we knew they were before the league shut down in the spring. Once Simmons was lost, so were the team’s chances, and ultimately, coach Brett Brown’s job. Because it was definitely the coaching, not the front office.

The Flyers were tripped up in the most Flyer-like fashion, unable to solve a sixth-seeded New York Islanders team. That’s a sentence I could have written before the season restarted — it’s a tradition.

Oh, the Phillies. We really have no excuse. It was the same team we thought it was, a lot of bats, but short 2 ½ starting pitchers and hobbled with a minor league bullpen, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930 season. Look it up — that’s saying something. A series of trades meant to bolster the ’pen with has beens and never wases had the expected result — It’s now been nine years without a postseason for the Phillies.

In a contender for headline of the year, The Philadelphia Inquirer said the final leg of the season saw the “Phillies continue to crumble in quest to become a mediocre playoff team.” As Jim Mora once said in Indianapolis, “What's that? Ah - Playoffs? Don't talk about - playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs? I just hope we can win a game!”

That final day of the season, the stars aligned as former Phillies manager Gabe Kapler’s San Francisco Giants (Gabe — still falling short in September, and oddly, still trying to get the Phils in the postseason) and the Milwaukee Brewers both lost. Worry not, the Phutiles dropped their seventh in eight to put us all out of our misery.

Ah, Jim Mora, my old friend. Even there, you have the Philly connection — in a past life Mora led the Philadelphia Stars of the old USFL — until 2018, the only football championship since 1960. Dare I say, a “gold standard?”

Which, inevitably, leads us to our savior in this mess of a season, the Philadelphia Eagles. Once labeled the “gold standard” of the NFL without winning the big one. The Eagles, always ready to upstage their neighbors at Citizen’s Bank Park. Well, upstage they did, losing to that “Washington Football Team” in Landover.

Yes, Carson Wentz was sacked eight times. Yes, he looked awful, but most of his offensive line was out. Wait ‘til next week, we said.

Next week the offensive line was back, but Wentz still looked awful.

So did the defense.

A week-three tie against the lowly Bengals, I think we know what we are in for. Like so much of 2020. Cue Clubber Lang, who once KO’d Philly’s greatest athlete…

“Pain…”

I’m no alarmist, I leave that to those who are arming themselves for the next great revolution, but I do think we are heading for an election crisis in November.
 
I’m going to throw politics out of the argument, there are plenty of people who get their talking points from their politician/pundit du jour who can take that tact. I want to speak observationally and objectively.
 
My father moved from his home of 45 years in early July. Like many of us, he filled out that convenient form to have his mail automatically forwarded to his new address. Those of us who move often know that can be hit-or-miss, but it gives you a head start on updating your address with the plethora of people you didn’t even realize needed to updated.
 
About three weeks after moving, he said, “I’m not really getting any mail,” so to test the system, I sent a dummy envelope to his former address. I will generously say I sent it in early August, but I’m tempted to say late July.
 
He received it Sept. 17.
 
So, yay USPS. I suppose you held up your end of the bargain, whether I feel the delivery time was acceptable or not.
 
The USPS being the butt of the joke is nothing new. It has been struggling financially for years. How many of us have used “the check is in the mail” as an excuse? How many of us have had important mail delivered late, or not at all?
 
"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"
 
While the postal service points out has no official motto, these words chiseled above the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue have, over the years, become synonymous with the expectations we have for the service.
 
Nowadays, when you read that, do you think of ideal public servant? Or Newman from Seinfeld? Be honest.
 
Many know the postal service needs assistance and reform. Nothing against postal workers — I’ve known many dedicated and hard-working USPS employees in my lifetime. But the critics are right when they argue that the USPS is a bloated, bureaucratic mess, and exhibit A as to the shortcomings of government-run agencies. 
 
Others prefer to privatize the service and have the government wash its hands of it. I have no doubt the president and his appointed Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy are among them, and they have a lot of support from their constituents. Amusingly, many of those who preach the Constitution is not a living document would readily privatize a constitution obligation, but I digress.
 
To the point, service was suffering before COVID and has gotten much worse this summer. Some of that can be attributed to the pandemic, for sure, but policies enacted by Trump’s appointee (since walked back) were a huge contributor and have eroded confidence in the USPS just as states are dumping a huge, unprecedented number of election ballots into the mail system.
 
Mail-in ballots are nothing new, we used to call them absentee ballots. For four years of college, like the president these last few years, I filled them out because I couldn’t be home to cast my ballot in person. It’s a confusing, tedious, frustrating process, and once you send it back through the mail, you hope someone might receive it and actually count it.
 
In response to COVID, states, to varying degrees, have increased the number of ballots they are mailing out. Some are sending them to all registered voters. On paper, this may make sense, but in practice, like so many well-intentioned solutions, the potential to fail miserably seems quite likely. 
 
The USPS says it will prioritize ballots. I hope so, but I don’t have a lot of faith. When I was in college, my Dad and I enjoyed testing the system: He’d send me a manilla envelope of papers and a Priority Mail package on the same day. Invariably, the manilla envelope would arrive in days, the “priority” mail in a week or two. And we were paying extra for that benefit.
 
I hope I’m wrong, but if you plan to vote by mail, get that ballot in ASAP. 
 
Think of it. Tons of additional ballots relying on an overtaxed USPS. Deadlines set by the states that may or may not be possible to meet. It all sounds like a recipe for disaster.
 
Despite the stereotypes, I believe many public servants are highly dedicated and capable of achieving more than we might think is possible under trying conditions, but honestly, I think they are being set up for failure.
 
Add to that equation no clear winner declared after polls close. Ballots being counted hours, days, weeks (?) after election day. Pundits screaming from all sides on the airwaves. A polarized electorate — brandishing guns at state houses and blunt objects in the streets — all at each other’s throats. President Trump, who has been laying the groundwork to claim a “rigged” election for months, even years, will seem prophetic. 
 
Put it all together, we could be in for an election crisis that would make Bush v Gore seem pale in comparison.

It was a beautiful day.
 
I remember that vividly. I remember feeling like September had arrived, and fall wasn’t far off.
 
I was sleeping in, the way a 29-year-old can and a 48-year-old wishes were still possible. My significant was up early, drinking her coffee and watching the morning shows, when she woke me with the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and I’d better come in to see.
 
I mumbled something about it happening before — in 1945 a B-25 Mitchell bomber had flown into the Empire State Building in a fog — but she assured me this was no small deal.
 
I stumbled out to the living room to see the North Tower smoking. As I watched, the image of a plane hitting the building was on screen — it took a moment to realize what I saw was not a replay, but a second plane striking the South Tower.
 
We all have our coping mechanisms for moments like those. For the first responders, it’s the call to action. For those at Ground Zero, perhaps it was shock, perhaps it was to flee. For me, and I think many in our industry, it was to shut off emotion and get to the job at hand — the story must be told, the news must happen — there will be plenty of time to process it later.
 
That day, for me, it was 12 hours of monitoring the wire services for stories and building news pages. 
 
I remember our Sunday editor, who sat near the television, alerting us to the collapse of the South Tower.

In passing, I remembered my friends and I viewing the city from the roof of the WTC in 1990.
 
I remember images like “The Falling Man” coming over the wire. As a plane hit the Pentagon, and another crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa., I made a few phone calls to people I knew in DC for reactions. 
 
I mainly remember keeping busy. Detached. Needing to be doing something, no matter how small. I wasn’t thinking how the world had changed that morning, that would come later, when I wrote a column I titled, "Yesterday, we saw evil."
 
Even now, polarized as we are, it is a conceit to think we live in the worst of times. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, things weren't all that different. We weren’t far removed from a presidential election that had to be decided, for all intents and purposes, by the Supreme Court. If not for the fact that Al Gore had conceded, we may have had a Constitutional crisis on our hands.
 
By the end of the day, Sept. 11, we were one. We didn’t know what the response would be, we only knew that we, America, had been attacked. We prayed. We donated. We volunteered. In the face of evil, Americans came to the aid of Americans.
 
That unity couldn’t last forever, it never does, and over time, moments like that fade from the collective memory. We are in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed far more lives than the terrorists did. But this is the first year since that awful day that remembrances seem like an afterthought. 
 
Yet, we cannot forget. 
 
We are still responding, 19 years later. Our men and women, many of whom who are too young to remember that fateful day, or perhaps not even born, continue that response in Afghanistan. A generation who have known nothing but a nation at war. They must not be forgotten.
 
And, 9/11 continues to claim victims nearly two decades on. Mental scars, carcinogens and toxins. Not just for first responders on the scene, but for those investigators and volunteers who came later. We must care for our own.
 
Those who committed that dastardly crime against humanity didn’t care about race, religion, sexuality or politics. They only saw one target — Americans. Surely they were not wiser than us?
 
In the wake of those horrific events, we made a promise. Now, more than ever, is the time to keep it. Never Forget.