The drive from Bloomington, Minn., to Fargo, N.D., on the morning of Jan. 30, 2018, five days before the Eagles’ victory in Super Bowl LII, was 3 hours and 45 minutes of earth tones and silence, of the occasional farmhouse amid vast farmland, of a sky without even a bird to puncture the endless gray.
During a walk around town, the cold and wind would stop you in your tracks, cutting through layers of shirt and sweater and ski jacket straight to your skin. For the quarterback who had been the NFL’s best player for most of that season to have come out of that region was a source of unfathomable pride to the people there, because, as one of them said, “There’s nothing else here.