My wife loved the Eagles. On Sunday, I’ll turn Maddy’s picture to face the TV.

The first thing you need to know about my wife, Maddy Gold, is that she always said she was a Philaphile — she loved this city, and was a perennial cheerleader for it. She would be over the moon that the Eagles are headed to the Super Bowl. She said all the time that in Jalen Hurts, Philadelphia fans finally got the quarterback they long deserved — someone who wasn’t just a talented player but also a man who respected the city and the fans, and was a team player in the truest sense.

For Maddy, “It’s a Philly Thing” was a motto and a mantra long before it was emblazoned on T-shirts. Throughout the NFL playoffs for the 2017-18 season, the one that got us to the big game, she was cheering the city as much as the Eagles.

Still, we watched every game together. A believer in talismans and totems, Maddy would bring out the special Tostitos chips bag that had the Eagles logo on it from which she’d served us chips and dip when we won the game that sent Philly to the playoffs. The chips were long gone, but she’d lovingly smoothed and folded the bag and put it in a kitchen drawer — saved for luck.

We’ve now had that bag for years, and she brought it out throughout this season. After she died suddenly a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I continued to bring it out — just as I would turn a framed photo of her toward the TV for each game, to watch along beside me.

When the Eagles went to the Super Bowl in 2018, we had a little party. The Tostitos bag had pride of place. Maddy served exactly the same food as we’d had for the first and second wins that season. If our friends didn’t cheer loudly enough, Maddy would prompt them. When one friend said the Eagles were going to lose, Maddy told her in no uncertain terms that defeatist talk was not allowed.

When the Eagles won, we watched the parade on Broad Street and the gathering at the Art Museum on TV. Maddy took screengrabs and posted them on Facebook and texted them to our nieces and nephew who live on the West Coast. For weeks after the Eagles’ Super Bowl win, Maddy was still trash-talking Tom Brady for his poor sportsmanship, when he refused to shake Nick Foles’ hand. Brady was forever anathema to her after that.

Yet for all the reverential cheerleading for our team, Maddy was not a sports fan. That was me.

Maddy’s love for the Eagles (and the Phillies) was all about her love for Philadelphia and what it meant to her. The granddaughter of four immigrant grandparents from Italy and the Eastern bloc, she had grown up watching how they’d embraced this city, so very far from their countries of origin. As a design professor at Drexel University, Maddy was invested in art and in her students, many of whom were immigrants themselves. Throughout the pandemic, she became a counselor as well as a professor to students trapped in unhappy home situations, whose only outlets were the Zoom classes and Zoom meetings with Maddy. She was as much of a cheerleader for them as she was for the city.

Maddy’s love for the Eagles was all about her love for Philadelphia.

Fascinating and funny, an accomplished artist, and the teacher everyone loved — the teacher everyone felt safe to go to with their crises — Maddy was an icon herself in this town. When she got sick last February and had to take a hiatus from teaching, students continued to text her for advice, for comments on their work, to hold on to a small part of her and the place she held in their lives.

Maddy never played sports, but I was 10 when I got my first football. My father and I would practice passing in the yard in the crisp autumn air in Germantown. My father was athletic and loved all sports — he’d been on the football team at Roxborough High School and played tennis at the University of Pennsylvania. My earliest memory of my paternal grandfather was of hearing the baseball game on the radio in their little East Falls rowhouse.

Maddy and I met and first fell in love at Girls’ High. I played sports — basketball, field hockey, archery. Maddy, the daughter of two painters, was an art major who never tossed a ball of any kind. But she would meet me secretly behind the bleachers on the field at school and steal a forbidden kiss or two. Those were shared memories we carried into adulthood and our 23-year marriage.

We had an incredible life together. I adored her, and still can’t believe she is gone.

After months of a mystery illness, in May 2022, Maddy was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer. Most of the year was a blur of doctors and surgeries, treatments and trauma. But we cheered the Phillies and we cheered the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Hospital, which was saving Maddy’s life, controlling her pain, limiting the cancer’s spread, and allowing her to watch the playoffs with me. We never figured that a sudden heart attack would be what felled her, without warning, during the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 12.

Maddy and I won’t get to watch this Super Bowl together. We won’t be holding hands and cheering. We won’t be eating her fabulous tapas with the totemic chips. I’ll be watching the game alone, that talismanic bag and her photo beside me.

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Grief and joy are oppositional forces in our lives. Yet when — there are no ifs for Philly sports fans — the Eagles win, I will have a frisson of joy. Not just for Philadelphia but for Maddy. I’ll recall those teenage kisses we shared so daringly on the playing field at Girls’ High, and I’ll remember how excited Maddy was at our last Super Bowl win. I’ll tweet out a photo of my beautiful, smiling wife with a message, “This one’s for you, sweetheart,” as I have after each win since her passing. I’ll celebrate, because she would want me to.

But it will be bittersweet — as “It’s a Philly Thing” truly is. We have many losses in this city of infinite dreams, but we go on believing. I go on believing in our teams and that one day I’ll meet up with Maddy again for another kiss behind some cosmic bleachers.

Victoria Brownworth is a writer in Philadelphia.