The totally true tale of the Superb Owl
One writer’s quest for answers in the surprisingly sentimental world of Super Bowl search trends.
It’s coming, everyone. It’s only one week until the Puppy Bowl. Team Ruff and Team Fluff are going head to head to decide once again which dogs are better at crossing arbitrary lines while being adorable. This is a big deal, and I’d appreciate it if you’d treat it as such.
But something else is happening this weekend. For those of us who like to go on Google Trends to see graphs do wacky spikes, this might be the highlight of the year. For us Trendsetters (which is what we call ourselves) it’s become an annual event: The Superb Owl Spike.
Look at how wacky this is. Zany, even.
Usually, that’s enough. You see a spike, record the spike in your Spike Notebook, crack open a Rolling Rock, and relay the spike to your Spike Mentor. Your mentor awards you anywhere between 1 and 5 Spike Stars, and then you check your Spike Star Balance to see if you want to redeem your stars for any prizes in the Spike Star Catalog. Then you go on with your life.
That’d been my routine for the last few years, but last year I went too far. “Don’t over-Google,” my Spike Mentor Mike would tell me. “You get your spike, you get your prizes, and that’s where you stop.”
But this time, I decided to check out the rest of Google. Searching for Superb Owl got me all sorts of weird results from football, to some excellent Owls, to this strange WordPress site.
“Weird,” I thought, and I was right. It was very weird.
But the site stuck with me. This person had a story to tell, and I wanted to find out more. I reached out to them through the site asking to if they wanted to talk more. I received a response in less than five minutes. Then I got another one about a half hour later. Another one came an hour after that with repeat messages every 45 minutes or so. I was asleep during this time, which I would come to find was a sign of weakness in this person’s eyes.
Regardless of the fact I was a “coward who was scared of the truth,” they agreed to talk with me. Their name was Mark, and they had something — a lot, actually — to say.
"OKAY SO A BIT OF BACKSTORY IF YOU DON’T MIND.I USED TO BE A KID, AND BACK THEN I HAD SOME FRIENDS. ME, AMY, BRITTANY, TRICK, AND KELAN USED TO PLAY NFL QUARTERBACK CLUB. WE CALLED OURSELVES THE NFL QUARTERBACK CLUB CLUB.Sorry, my voice is getting sore so I’ll stop typing like that. Every year we would play a tournament and the winner would be crowned the Superb Owl. Brittany really liked owls, and Kelan really liked Brittany, so that’s how that worked. This continued on until senior year of high school. Same group, same SNES, same game.Senior year I won for the first time, and I got very excited. I TRIED TYPING LIKE THIS FOR THE FIRST TIME, AND IT BECAME MY THING. I HIGH-FIVED EVERYONE WHO WAS WILLING, AND THAT WAS EVERYONE.I ALSO GOT A TROPHY. Kelan once got third place in a putting competition because he kept his own score and cheated a lot, so we re-purposed that by spray painting half of it red and the other half of it a darker red. We also drew an owl on the golf ball. It was AWESOME.Trick won the year before, and I got the impression that the trophy was the only physical thing that meant anything in the world to him. Sensing weakness, I said “I guess I’m the Superb Owl forever now. It’s not like we’re going to get to do this once we all go off to college.” Trick started crying, and I felt bad for some reason. Everyone else did too. We finished off the Doritos, and we all went back home. Trick stayed behind for a little while trying to compose himself. I’m told it took about three hours.Anyways, this was also the year I was all about getting into low-speed one-car accidents. I was drifting down Maple at a casual 12 mph and was just about to knock a curb just so. Unfortunately, some squirrel-like bird flew down and distracted me, so I clipped the edge at the wrong angle and popped a tire. I still got that adrenaline rush from the accident, but I didn’t know how to change a tire. Still don’t, honestly. Send me an email after this to remind me to look into that, okay, Matt? Thanks.So I was just down there in the ditch, waiting for AAA to come when I decided to take a nap. As I was drifting off, a vision came.BUT IT WASN’T A VISION. IT WAS REAL. AN OWL CAME DOWN, LAID MAJESTICALLY ON THE HOOD OF MY CAR AND TOLD ME:“MARK. THOSE WHO KEEP THE SPIRIT OF FOOTBALL IN THEIR HEARTS MUST KEEP THEIR FRIENDS THERE TOO.”AT THIS POINT, THE SUPERB OWL TROPHY FLOATED OUT OF THE PASSENGER’S SEAT INTO THE OWL’S HAND/WINGS/WHATEVER. HE TOLD ME “I WILL RETURN THIS TO YOU WHEN YOU RETURN TO THEM.”WITH A GLORIOUS HOOT, HE DISAPPEARED. HE TOOK MY TROPHY, BUT HE GAVE ME SO MUCH MORE.When I tried to tell my friends about it the next day, they didn’t believe me. They said it was a concussion, but I didn’t have one. An angel came to me and tHE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW."
I replied “Thanks.” And I was hoping that would be the end of it. Spike Mentor Mike would be rubbing this in my face if he ever found out that I over-Googled. “This is what happens,” he would tell me. I might even lose some Spike Stars. Best to just forget about it and move on.
But Mark wouldn’t let me. A couple times a week, I’d get emails like this:
"HEY COWARD WHY HAVEN’T YOU PUT MY STORY ANYWHERE YET?I CAN SEND YOU A DRAWING OF HIM IF THAT WILL HELP. HERE LOOK AT THIS:"
"HEY MATT SORRY ABOUT CALLING YOU A COWARD ANYWAYS, WHEN YOU PUT THE STORY UP SEND ME A LINK SO I CAN SEND IT TO AMY"
And:
"HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A BIT, ARE YOU ON YOUR LUNCH BREAK?"
And:
"I’VE BEEN PROSTULATYZING THIS SINCE 2009 AND IM NOT GOING TO STOP NOW"
And:
"I MEANT TO SAY PROSELYTIZING IN MY LAST SUBJECT SORRY"
This did stop after a couple months, and I continued carrying on with life.
Fast forward to this year. I was going to cash in on my Superb Owl Spike Stars, when I noticed an important date in my Trends bar.
2009 was the low watermark, the same date as Mark’s first recorded experience with the Superb Owl. Since then, there has been an upward trajectory in interest. Is this coincidence, or a sign of further sightings? Further interest? Further questions to ask?
I did the bad thing. I reached out to Mark. The response I got was not what I expected:
"Hey Matt. Good to hear from you. I hope you’re well. You’re not really needed any more, but thanks for reaching out."
This was off-putting. I liked it better when he was annoying me by accident. I replied with a bit asking what his requirements were.
"Hey Matt. Sorry to hear about your cat. I’m sure it’s just sleeping.I guess I can explain. It’d been nine years, but the NFL Quarterback Club Club finally got back together a couple weeks ago. Trick has a kid. Brittany and Amy are together. Kelan told me I’d been pronouncing his name wrong since I met him in third grade. It was a beautiful time playing a beautiful game with beautiful people and Trick.And I got my trophy back. Just like the Superb Owl promised, I got my trophy back. He returned, but he didn’t just appear to me at the scene of an accident. He appeared to all of us.It was a gradual process. At first, Bernie Kosar appeared to grow wings. Then his helmet was replaced with a twirly head. Before we knew it, the owl was coming out of the monitor, trophy in hand. He spoke to us, but with different words for each who heard him.To me, he said, “The Power of The Love of Football Will Guide You In This Time Of Sad.”I asked everyone else what the Superb Owl said, but they explained that they were pretty sure the words could not be properly spoken by a human mouth and tongue, that maybe their faces would explode. I understood.We held hands for a while, then we all went back to our lives as they are now. I won’t lie, Matt. It was the most incredible experience of my life. Either that or getting married that one time.I’m less desperate to get this story out now. My friends saw him, and now my friends believe me, and I feel a little less mad. You can publish this if you want, but I feel like I already have closure.Thank you all the same,Mark"
This may have concluded things for Mark, but I was still in the dark. I asked if he’d be okay providing me with his friends’ contact information so that they could corroborate his story.
Surprisingly, he said yes. Surprisingly, they all said the same general thing in response. Surprisingly, they all provided illustrations.
"Amy: I can’t speak about it. It’s still too raw, but I can show you what he looked like."
"Kelan: I don’t really think it’s something I want to talk about. I’m still trying to put it into words myself, but I’ll show you kind of what it looked like to me."
"Brittany: This kind of feels like a personal thing between me and the Superb Owl, but his picture is still burned into my mind. He looked like this:"
"Trick: Yeah. He actually didn’t appear to me, but I played along. Are you going to write about this on the internet? If it’s on the internet, you can use GIFs, right? Use this one:"
"Thanks man. No one needs to know I didn’t see it. Much appreciated, brother. Go Hawks."
The trail went cold. Mark has stopped replying to me as I’m a “leech,” and the rest of them are in the same maddening state Mark was when I first started speaking to him. There’s not much to really get from them until they calm down. Maybe I’ll check back in in 2027.
I don’t really know where I stand on this whole matter. Considering the trajectory of the Google Trend results, there’s more to the “Superb Owl” search than just a simple mistype of Super Bowl. There’s velocity to it. People are more interested now than they were before.
But is it really the result of a vision bird, spreading a message of friendship and football above all else? Can that really be the right answer? Let’s go to the answer prancer.
I think that’s for each of us to decide.