Him again?Patrick Smith / Getty
In February 2002, the New England Patriots defeated the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, and a 24-year-old Tom Brady was named the game’s Most Valuable Player. With the country still reeling from the September 11 attacks a few months earlier, the game itself was staged as a tribute to a nation in crisis, determined to hold together against an unprecedented threat to democracy. The Patriots, in their red-white-and-blue uniforms, took the field as a team all at once rather than be introduced individually, as was the tradition in Super Bowls. This led the Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter to refer to the Patriots as the “United Team of America.”