In the last photo I have of my father, he and my mother are watching the Eagles play the Bears last November.

My father, carefully buttoned into a light-blue shirt, waves toward the camera. Someone who had not known him — who did not know how his knowledge of the world had dwindled from reveling in the intricacies of organic chemistry to feeding the dog, with help, to querulously parsing the intentions of these three strange people, his wife and daughters — would have thought my mother was the sick one: she looks exhausted, anxious, determined. However hard it is to have Alzheimer’s, it may be harder still to take care of someone with it.

What makes the picture bearable is knowing that the Eagles game is on the other side of it. I grew up with an Eagles game on TV every Sunday from September to January and a radio tuned to 1210 WCAU the rest of the week. I grew up judging my uncle’s stubborn defenses of the cheering after Michael Irvin’s career-ending spinal cord injury in 1999 (“The people clapping had no idea how bad he was hurt”) and the booing and battery-shelling of Santa Claus in 1968 (“What you have to understand is, this guy was a terrible Santa Claus”). I was in the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, leaving for summer vacation, when we heard on WCAU that Jerome Brown had died, and I was improbably in the stands for 4th and 26, one of the few football plays to have its own Wikipedia entry.

The latter is a moment I remember as the psychological opposite of the destruction of Alderaan, as tens of thousands of voices suddenly cried out in unexpected joy. I was sitting in the upper, upper reaches of Lincoln Financial Field, between my sportswriter friend Brandon (from the Philly suburbs, he’d somehow morphed into a Patriots fan) and a man named Loony who’d spent most of the game with his head between his knees. When Freddie Mitchell caught Donovan McNabb’s 28-yard pass, Loony jumped out of his seat, screamed, hugged everyone around him who would submit to his drunken, unsteady embrace and then returned to his previous position of agonized and desperate hope.

“Agonized and desperate hope” may be the default psychological setting for an Eagles fan. I have never been anything else, so I cannot know if this is the natural state of being for others — surely it is not for Brandon, the Patriots supporter. Philadelphia is singular in its veneration of the underdog, the backup, the guy who didn’t expect to get the call. We worship at the altar of a fictional boxer and line up to take pictures with a statue of Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles, “presented by Bud Light” and inscribed with the immortal words, “You want Philly Philly?”

I was far from home when the Eagles won the Super Bowl two years ago, three months after my father was finally, officially, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. When they were behind, I texted my friends, enjoying the familiar sound of their grumbling; when they were ahead, I sat with my chin on a table and my hands tented over my eyes. Resignation was familiar; anticipation unbearable. During halftime, I tried to pull it apart, why a victory felt so important, before settling on the hope that winning the Super Bowl — something so big, so improbable, so belated, so desired — would pierce through the dark clouds gathered in my father’s mind.

Once it was over, I called home. “Daddy,” I said. “We won!”

I waited for something I could shape, burrow into, a meaningful pause suggestive of activity deep inside him: recognition, which is what everyone who loves someone with Alzheimer’s waits for, hopes for, like a farmer studying the sky and praying for rain. But there was nothing, just the sound of him passing the phone back to my mother and her voice, sewing our conversation together, wondering if I’d be home in time for the parade.

My dad died four weeks after the Eagles beat the Bears — a few hours before they lost to the Dolphins. (“Your father didn’t need to see this,” my mom said at one point.) I took my uncle to the Cowboys game a few weeks later. I think I went looking for my dad — but he wasn’t that guy, the lifetime season-ticket holder tailgating in the parking lot. He just loved them because they reminded him of South Philly, of his family, of his brother calling midway through the fourth quarter with a new and unexpected gripe: “What now?” my dad would say. I never heard the answers, just my father’s laughter in response.

My friend Courtney took me to see the Eagles play the Seahawks a few weeks ago, at the start of what we hoped might be an unlikely but unstoppable march to the Super Bowl. He lives in Los Angeles but is, after my father, the biggest Eagles fan I’ve ever known. Court’s own father maintains no allegiances; his mother, he said, was rooting for Seattle. Her father had loved the Seahawks like mine had loved the Eagles. And she had grown to love them even more after her father died, Court said, and I understood then, as he said it, what it meant: to wear the jersey, to go to the game, to spend three hours every Sunday with the living and the dead.

Our night ended not as we hoped but in a Center City parking garage, watching a woman berate a man in a Carson Wentz jersey for his ongoing support of the concussed quarterback. For the brief moments Josh McCown et al. held onto a 3-3 tie, Courtney and I had made plans: we could meet in Green Bay, and then San Francisco; Miami would take care of itself. I would drive, he would fly; we would get a hotel room in Chicago if we had to. If we could just make it out of the Wild Card game with a 40-year-old former ESPN analyst at quarterback, who knew what lay ahead of us? Wasn’t this how it always worked: Wentz got hurt, and someone else pulled off a miracle? There might be so much time together: planning and hoping and commiserating, and hugging the Loonys sitting next to us. Winning the game would give us another seven days, and maybe seven more, and maybe even more beyond that. I will never be able to spot a penalty before the flag is thrown, but I understand what it means to be enraptured by excellence, in the feats a body is able to perform — and how this can be the easiest way to justify the time we spend together, friends and brothers and fathers and daughters.

Courtney and I stayed until the end, after D.K. Metcalf’s down-field catch with 1:40 left in the fourth quarter: “You’re not helping,” the guy in front of us bellowed miserably to the early deserters.

I had wondered how I would feel when the Eagles lost this season, the season that my dad died. I wondered if I would feel like something between us had broken. I did not, though. I felt it — I feel it — like a physical thing, an electrical current, unimpeded, as undeniable as the field itself. I do not doubt it will endure: next season, and the next, and all the seasons that follow.

“See you in September!” someone behind us sang out to the emptying stadium, and those of us left cheered.

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Tonight I will drive to Philadelphia and see Bruce Springsteen for the XX time.

Those Xs aren’t a typo. I have seen Bruce Springsteen in concert more than 10 times — more than 20, maybe more than 30 — but fewer than XXX, having started too late — in his career, in my life — for that. I like to sit next to the XXX people at the shows because they are enraptured, and I wonder what happened in their lives to bind them so closely to this man and this experience. I wait for the song that makes them close their eyes, to block out the crowd and live alone, in that moment, with that song. Who did they love and now can no longer love (“Brilliant Disguise”)? What lucky break did they miss (“Atlantic City”)? What became of their jobs (“Jack of All Trades”)? What became of their homes (“My City of Ruins”)? Who have they lost (“Terry’s Song,” all of them)?

It is key to the Bruce Springsteen experience that every one of those questions, not only the final one, wants to end itself with the word “lost.”

I saw him in Toronto on a 9/10 very shortly after 9/11, and I said to myself: I may be among Canadians, but at least I am home. I saw him at Madison Square Garden in 2012 and ran up the escalators, with the rest of the latecomers, as the opening blast of joy and desire and anger that is “Badlands” rang down the space. I leaned out the window of my South African boyfriend’s London apartment to hear what we could when he played Hyde Park, when the exchange rate had strawberries at $12 the basket and put the tickets out of reach for an underemployed design writer in the middle of the recession. We saw him together when he headlined Glastonbury, and we saw him, apart, three years later, when he returned to Hyde Park. I have taught the South African something, I told myself, having come to Europe for that show, and one in Vienna, if not against my doctor’s advice then with his reluctant acquiescence: I was old enough then to discover what it is like, exactly, to go into a medical office and come out with an unexpectedly keen sense of my own mortality. After the show — which I had not liked, with its muddy, querulous, snarling crowd — I took a bath, counted my heartbeats, and waited to die. If it’s going to be now, I thought, it might as well be after a Bruce Springsteen show.

Tonight, I will be far from the only person in the crowd to trace my past relationships, and the inconstant perfection of my physical form, by way of Bruce Springsteen concerts.

I was in elementary school when Born in the USA came out, old enough to understand the title but too young to understand the lyrics. My foremost memory of myself in middle school is standing on my parents’ lawn in the rain, listening to the Cure on my Walkman. In high school, I saw Violent Femmes and Indigo Girls; in college, I went to the Beacon Theatre and waited on the sidewalk until a man gave me his spare ticket to Tori Amos and I gave him half of a bagel in return.

I didn’t listen to Bruce Springsteen until after college. I was working at a website in Manhattan when my friend Bill — the co-worker who knew all the best songs decades after they charted, all the best movies weeks before they come out — told me to listen to “The River.” I had actually never heard it, despite nearly two decades growing up in New Jersey, despite the fact that my own high school sits on the Highway 31 of “Reason to Believe.” That was it; there was nothing more; I fell in love with the music the way I would fall in love with the South African: without reservation.

My friends don’t get it (except the ones who do, and they totally, totally do): Why are you going again and again? There is not much cool about going to a Bruce Springsteen show (except in the best sense of cool, in the sense that the essence of cool is to love hugely, unabashedly, without apology). It does not, though, broadcast a refined sense of style or aesthetics; I am not positioning myself in a tribe that is beyond cynicism or reproach.

It is not dangerous, in the way cool has been (Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious). One expression of cool is of defiant superiority: We may be poor, we may hurt, but we are young and brave and alive. Cool wins, and in style. After four decades together, the tribe of Bruce Springsteen does not win so much as it endures. It creaks. It is not whole, as anyone knows who has seen the video tribute, shown regularly now in concert, to saxophonist Clarence Clemons (who died in 2011, who kissed Bruce on stage, unabashedly, without reservation) and organist Danny Federici (who died in 2008, who went to that same high school on Highway 31). We lose: strength, beauty, money, love.

That admission, though, is a saving grace in the most literal sense. Though socially conscious music of all forms, of all times, speaks to anger, injustice and loss, we are without question in a cultural moment that privileges illusion: of wealth, of youth, of beauty, the whole slithering, contoured mask of perfection that has become our aesthetic ideal. Our culture celebrates the winners (however predatory) and dismisses the losers (however innocent), and we turn ourselves into monsters so that we can assure our place among the victors. Despite Springsteen’s progressive politics, Donald Trump bumper stickers will challenge Hillary Clinton’s for popularity in the parking lot of Citizens Bank Park tonight. The rage that Trump has channeled so assiduously runs like a needle through decades of Springsteen’s songs. The blame is placed elsewhere, but the anger is the same: just wait for the cheers from the crowd that routinely follow these (truncated) lyrics, from “Jack of All Trades,” written, not coincidentally, in 2009:

The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin….
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight.

Donald Trump and Bruce Springsteen give voice to these same concerns, and with the same level of perceived authenticity. One promises that everything lost can be won back. One doesn’t. But what Bruce Springsteen gives us is better.

He gives us redemption. He acknowledges that our losses are real. We are not the same as we once were; we are not unblemished. But he also promises that whatever has been lost — whatever will be lost in the years still to come! — is with us, now and always, that true love is mutable but neverending, that it persists, that we persist, and each concert is a stand against those losses, and builds anew that bulwark.

Why do you go again and again? my friends ask.

“Because I don’t go to church anymore,” I say.

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