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Patriots parade: Boston won’t match the Eagles’ celebration from last year

Philly showed the world how a Super Bowl parade should truly be celebrated: with unadulterated joy, and without Tom Brady.

Buses holding players, coaches, and team staff reach the Philadelphia Museum of Art during the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade last February.
Buses holding players, coaches, and team staff reach the Philadelphia Museum of Art during the Eagles’ Super Bowl parade last February.Read more--- Tim Tai / File Photograph

If Sunday’s Super Bowl snoozefest between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams was any indication, Tuesday’s championship parade in Boston will be more tea party than toga party.

We know Boston’s already hosted five Super Bowl parades since 2002, but the parade had to make its way to Philly last year — after the Eagles beat the Patriots in Super Bowl LII — in order for the world to see how a Super Bowl win should truly be celebrated: with unadulterated joy. And without Tom Brady.

Here’s how Philly set the bar when it comes to Super Bowl parades:

Our players dress in costume, not just in uniform

When photos of Chris Long dressed in an Allen Iverson jersey and an ankle-length fur coat hit social media before the parade kicked off, we knew it would be good. But when pictures of Jason Kelce in full Mummers' regalia — replete with feather flair — began to circulate, we knew it would be epic.

Tom Brady, on the other hand, would probably never be caught dead in a Mummers' costume. For one thing, the sequins wouldn’t go well with his skin tone. The biggest fashion risk he’s likely to take for the parade is a wearing a scarf and backwards ball cap with a pea coat.

Freedom of speech — we started that and we work it

Of all the moments — great and small — to occur during the Eagles' Super Bowl Parade, perhaps none will go down in history like Jason Kelce’s hungry underdog speech on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In fact, it may be the G.S.O.A.T.: the Greatest Speech Of All Time. Only President Thomas J. Whitmore’s address to a ragtag crew of fighter pilots about to take on an alien invasion even comes close.

And it was not just Kelce’s words that filled the streets of Philadelphia on Super Bowl parade day. In Philadelphia, where freedom of speech was secured for all in this country via the First Amendment, we don’t mince words. Not on the podium and not on the streets, where, as my colleague William Bender so deftly put it last year: “There were three-syllable chants about Nick Foles' stature and four-syllable chants indicating the masses held Brady in considerably lower esteem.”

Our parade did not have Tom Brady

Listen, we get that many think Brady is the G.O.A.T. (insert tiny goat emoji). He very well may be, but that only makes the entire city of Philadelphia loathe him even more.

Top dogs don’t fare well in a city of underdogs, where our current most famous resident is actually named Gritty. In fact, there’s only one place top dogs are welcome in this area — at the Kennel Club of Philadelphia’s National Dog Show.

Everything just seems too easy for Brady — the supermodel wife, the Super Bowl trophies, the chiseled good looks. And we don’t like it because just like Tina Turner, we here in Philly “never ever do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough." And often, we leave the nice part out.

See, the Eagles earned their Super Bowl parade and after 57 years, so did their fans. And they didn’t earn it with a fancy quarterback who dresses like an avocado for Halloween. We don’t even know what avocados are in Philly and even if we did we certainly wouldn’t put them on our sandwiches.

No sirree, we won our Super Bowl with a backup quarterback who looks like Napoleon Dynamite and the victory parade was all that much sweeter for it.

Cop a proposal

Love was in the air last year between strangers and longtime companions after the Eagles' Super Bowl win. Fueled, perhaps, by the rush of adrenaline and serotonin — or just by booze — many took the opportunity to propose in the aftermath of the Eagles' victory.

One Atlantic City police officer who traveled to the parade with his longtime girlfriend proposed right along the parade route. He even got a Philly cop to watch over him to make sure nobody stole the ring as he did it.

“[If] God blesses us with children, we’ll be able to tell our children when we got engaged it [was] a historical event,” the officer said. “The Eagles got a ring so my beautiful fiancée gets a ring too.”

Given how often the Patriots have Super Bowl parades, we doubt that anyone will be proposing along the parade route because it’d just be like proposing on a random Tuesday and who does that?

Banner scanner chatter

While listening to Philadelphia’s police scanners on any given day is can feel like a dystopian Philip K. Dick novel, on Super Bowl parade day it was like listening to Lt. Frank Drebin’s scanner in the Naked Gun films. Eagles players were getting off buses to do the Electric Slide and at least one minister partied with his congregants on the roof of a church.

So Boston, enjoy your parade but don’t think for a minute that you can party harder than Eagles fans because we had to fight for our right to party.

For a look back on a real, hard-fought Super Bowl party, relive the parade festivities through the eyes of our staff photographers:

» READ MORE: Porta potties, story behind Kelce’s Mummer suit, fans climbing things: Highlights of the Eagles Super Bowl parade

» READ MORE: The best things Eagles fans said at the Super Bowl parade in Philadelphia

» READ MORE: Fan signs get creative at Eagles parade

» READ MORE: Eagles parade attendance: Close to 700,000, experts say