'It's our year': Eagles fans in frigid Minneapolis ready for their Super Bowl moment

MINNEAPOLIS — The day broke icy, naturally, minus-4 degrees and falling, but for Philly fans in Minneapolis, there is too much at stake to care. It is their team, this moment, a shared piece of history they'd trekked north for.

People such as Ed Moran of Minersville, Pa., and his wife, Joyce, who will be married 50 years this spring. Ed attended his first Eagles game in 1961. Joyce says, "We've been waiting 50 years."

People such as  Paul Villari, whose father, Placido, attended the NFL championship in 1948, at Shibe Park. Paul and his son Alex won last-minute Super Bowl tickets through the season ticket holder lottery and traveled from Cinnaminson.

The family has had season tickets for 70 years. Villari never took his father's name off the ticket account after he died at the age of 93 in 2015.

"Last Friday [the Eagles] called me and asked for my father," Paul said. " 'Is this Placido?' "I was really taken aback."

Sunday morning, Villari said he was feeling full of emotion about the day. He has a Mass card for his father that he and Alex plan to leave behind at U.S. Bank Stadium. They're lying low all day, he said, then headed to the Mall of America to board a blue line for the big game.

"It's a tremendous feeling I have with my siblings and my siblings still at home," Villari said. "They're going to watch together. I think my father is going to be there in spirit. I got to believe it. There's got to be some kind of mojo."

First, they had to get through security, and the logistics of getting 60,000 fans into a secure perimeter was proving challenging Sunday afternoon.

At the Mall of America, fans were encouraged to go through a pre-screening process before getting on a train to the venue. Thousands of fans were crowding in the mall by 11 a.m., waiting in a holding area, 90 minutes before the first trains were set to leave. After moving through the hours-long line, the fans were expecting to be escorted in small groups to the train station, where they'd be searched by security personnel and then transported to the stadium.

While Susan Montclair, of Ocean City, N.J., was separated from her family and admitted the line was long and unorganized, she said the wait was worth it.

"We want it so bad," said Montclair, who was sporting Eagles gear down to her fingernails.

With no traditional tailgating allowed around the shimmering Bank, Philly pre-gamers filled up swanky downtown hotel bars and neighborhood taverns.

Cindy Kerr, who flew in to Minneapolis on Friday with her husband, Gavin, was one of those feeling the full range of emotions Sunday.

"I don't know what the score is going to be, but they're going to win," she predicted.

In December, Eagles coach Doug Pederson surprised the Wayne couple at the NovaCare Complex with Super Bowl tickets. They founded the charity Ryan's Case for Smiles after their teenage son died 10 years ago of bone cancer. The nonprofit has delivered 1.7 million volunteer-sewn pillowcases to cheer up children at 363 hospitals.

Pederson supplied the tickets after Eagles star quarterback Carson Wentz was knocked out for the season, so the team's fate was uncertain.

"Everybody was nervous. Even Doug Pederson said we had a long way to go," Kerr said. "But I told him he had to be positive. For some reason, I knew they were going to be there."

Kerr, 60, now fights appendix cancer and is to resume chemotherapy next week. The Super Bowl is a welcome distraction.

"How cool is this?" she said. "The Eagles are here."

Frank Pino, of central New Jersey, who on Saturday was grousing about a Super Bowl week held, basically, "in the Cherry Hill Mall," was focused on game day on one thing: football.

"D line needs to relentlessly harass Brady, secondary needs to maintain discipline to protect again Gronk. O line needs to have the game of their lives to protect Nick," he said Sunday.

Alexandra Convery, owner of Westy's tavern in Philadelphia, came to Minnesota with her husband and four children. For Convery, hanging around the Mall of America in the days leading up to the Super Bowl was a surreal culmination of years spent out in Lot N6 as the Swoop Troop tailgate of dreams.

Her family ran into nearly the entire Eagles team as players walked from their mall-attached hotel to a party Friday night near the roller coaster, a parade of familiar faces stopping to pose for pictures, smiling with the Convery bunch as if they were old family friends.

"Our kids said, 'Best day of our lives,' " Convery said. Until later Sunday, they hope.

For the Philadelphia Eagles and their fans alike this week, touched down amidst the odd Minneapolis backdrops of the mall and downtown frozen streetscapes, it all felt like family, to be honest.

"It's our year," Convery said. "I"ll probably cry."

Tami Levin, 51, of Fairmount, talked about feeling "aligned" with the team's underdog mentality. Last month, Levin, who worked in victim services in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office for 26 years, was fired when new District Attorney Larry Krasner took over in January. Then, a week and a half ago, a car struck her while she was riding her bike. She required surgery.

Levin says the Super Bowl couldn't have come at a better time. The longtime Eagles fan arrived in Minneapolis on Friday with her 27-year-old nephew — they'd won tickets on a $100 raffle in April, well before the Birds' success was imagined.

She said her team making it all the way to the Super Bowl that she just happened to have tickets to — at a particularly fraught time in her life — was beyond serendipity.

"Life happens the way it's supposed to happen," she said. "That's given me hope the whole time."

Then there's Alex Fish, 67, and his son, lawyer Lonny Fish, 46, of Philadelphia, who arrived in Minneapolis without tickets, Lonny monitoring prices until game day. "Father, son going to the Super Bowl," Lonny said, as if that was not the most extraordinary thing for Eagles fans.

On Sunday, he said he'd finally pulled the trigger for tickets: two lower-level seats for $3,500 each. He said some of the really expensive tickets were dropping in price by Sunday. He and his father were going to stay out of the arctic air as long as possible Sunday, he said.

"It's exciting," he said. "I hope one day to take my daughter. Maybe when that happens, it'll be in Miami."

For Andy Moffatt, the captain of the Eagles' 22-member drum line, Sunday morning was a mix of anticipation and superstition. The 37-year-old lifelong Eagles fan who lives in the city's Fishtown section refuses to even make a prediction for fear of jinxing the game.

"Last night felt a little bit like Christmas Eve," Moffatt said Sunday morning. "But you have to go to sleep or else Santa won't come."

Since Thursday, the Eagles Drumline has made about a dozen appearances on local and national television and has created what turned into "Eagles pep rallies" throughout Minneapolis, Moffatt said. He added that although they won't be playing at today's big game, he's satisfied with being able to do what he loves for a team he adores. "The thing is, we're all just really avid Eagles fans who love to drum," Moffatt said. "So both our passions come together."

Maggie Quinn, 26, of Doylestown, hasn't been able to properly string together sentences since Friday morning around 8:30 a.m. She's been waiting a lifetime for this feeling — the one that she and her 23-year-old sister, Carolyn, have felt since Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie asked them about the Super Bowl: "What if you got to go?"

"I think I blacked out," said Quinn. "My sister nearly passed out and [Guthrie] gave us a hug and said 'It's really happening! It's all happening!' "

The two went to Rockefeller Center on Friday and won Super Bowl tickets, plus a hotel stay and airfare live on their favorite morning news program.

"I've never seen a team in the history of the franchise that's clicked like this," she said. "They really seem like a brotherhood."

Not everybody made it to Minnesota.  Kimberly Goldstein of Philadelphia tried to win every raffle, and her daughter tried at school, but ultimately, Kimberly could not pull the money together to make the trip. She was in Minneapolis in spirit, though. "It just hurts really bad that I can't afford the prices," she said. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the Super Bowl. I'm so heartbroken."

But for those with the golden ticket, the frozen security lines, game-day temperatures,  and a lifetime of disappointment were only the latest hurdles before entry to a Super Bowl stadium where "Eagles" is painted on one end of the field. And to see the team, their guys, their lovably ferocious underdogs, ready to take on the been there, done that Patriots.

Donna Spross, 40, of Wenonah, N.J. — by way of Fishtown — bought tickets in October to come out to Minneapolis, she said, "because I knew they were going."

She paid $2,000 a seat and traveled with her husband and four children, ages 9 to 16. "We have found everybody out here is rooting for the Eagles," she said.

As for the weather, "It feels like somebody's biting you."

Her only hope, now, was that during the Super Bowl itself, it will be the underdogs chomping down.

.