My New View of Superbowl

I recant.
I was wrong.
I have view the Superbowl hype with more than a tad of cynicism but today my wife and I drove downtown and strolled Bay Street and the Northbank Riverwalk to expose ourselves to what is actually going on in Jacksonville. It was magnificent.
Event planners seemed to have allowed for everything. Traffic flow. Hundreds of Portopotties. Boat docking. Access to water. Security barriers. They did not miss a trick.
Back in the 1960s I went to the World’s Fain in New York but the crowds of people there paled in comparison with the number of people out enjoying the Superbowl festivities here in Jacksonville today. Pedestrians of every race and age flowed through the streets, orderly, courteous, happy. Blimps, helicopters and small airplanes pulling advertising banners filled the sky, while on the St. Johns River hundreds of boats of every imaginable type filled the water.
I wrote a history of Bay Street that’s included in my Jax history book Crackers & Carpetbaggers; I have a good idea of what went on at the Sub-Tropical Exposition, at V-J Day, at Florida/Georgia games over the years… But today’s spectacle topped anything this city has seen before.
Then this evening the city put on a fireworks display featuring pyrotechnics fired from three barges in the river, from the tops of seven downtown buildings on both sides of the river – and this display outdid the 1976 National Bicentennial displays I saw in D.C. in front of the Washington Monument and on the White House grounds.
Jacksonville, I have underestimated your class. My mindset has been too provincial. I apologize. Never have I been more proud of my hometown. You are more wonderful than I thought.