Word: bowlful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Here are the results for your favorite Super Bowl...
After the Indianapolis Colts' Super Bowl victory over the Chicago Bears last night, all the talk today is about Peyton Manning finally slapping the can't-win-the-big-one monkey off his back. But in their revelry, Indianapolis residents - Hoosiers, as everyone in Indiana is called - seem to be throwing off their own ape: their city's image as a small, sleepy backyard cabin to Chicago's cosmopolitan, big-shouldered big house just three hours away...
...fond of the idea of cities using pro sports franchises to validate their self-worth; there are too many Super Bowl champion towns out there whose schools, economies and infrastructures remain mired in the cellar. But in this instance, Indianapolis can probably be excused for seeking affirmation on the NFL stage - if only because the shadow to the north that it's lived under for so long has been such a, well, a bear...
...should know. I watched this particular Super Bowl drama from a unique perspective: I grew up in Indianapolis, spent some of my favorite career years in Chicago and now live in Miami, where this past week I could watch the Interstate 65 complexes of superiority and inferiority play out on South Beach. Bears fans were the in-your-face, we're-a-real-city crowd whenever they spotted the softer, royal blue clusters of Colts backers. I even heard one Chicagoan hurl the "redneck" epithet. (Miamians, meanwhile, just got a good laugh watching pale, overweight Midwesterners trying to swagger...
...Super Bowl revenge, as a result, was all that much sweeter for my fellow Hoosiers. Even when cultural arbiters like Hollywood pay tribute to Indiana, it's usually couched in quaintness. Sports movies like Hoosiers and Breaking Away tend to emphasize a parochial amateurness that keeps the state from being taken seriously as a pro player setting - although Indianapolis, in fact, bills itself as the world's amateur sports capital - while films like Brian's Song and The Natural showcase Chicago as an Elysian field of major-league legends...