On the Friday before the midterms, the last thing I was feeling was patriotic. The attack ads here in PA had gotten so personal that every politician had been accused of being every kind of status-grifting monster, both imaginable and unimaginable. So the country itself got pressed to the back of my mind, in favor of taking two of our nephews to a Sixers game with my wife.

Now, it's Philly. Between the name of the team, the Liberty Bell on everything, and the red, white, and blue palette, it's about as American as it gets. Apple pie ain't got s*** on roast beef and horseradish (they were out of roast pork).

But this night was about the kids, and about pro sports, and about them going back to middle school to flex on their friends that they "saw LeBron."

I was very aware of what the night was really for. Not politics, not life, not business, not spending irrational amounts of money on what can only be called a luxury experience. I was there with a benevolent offering of middle school status points, hoping A. that LeBron would play so they could see him, and B. that we'd beat the Knicks so we didn't have a two-hour drive home with that bummer hanging over our heads and hearts.

I'm making a big deal of how non-patriotic I felt going into this, not necessarily unpatriotic, just the result of how deservedly sour we all are on politics and politicians lately.

It’s important preamble because something happened at that game that flipped my feelings in a way I did not expect, re: we, the people.

First, one more detail about the build-up. If you followed last year's playoffs, you know the Knicks swept the Sixers 4-0, mercilessly. The rumor is that at the last Philly home game, when the Sixers got knocked out, 70% or more of the crowd was rooting for New York. I warned my wife and the kids to expect a lot of New Yorkers. This was not going to be a normal Philly crowd.

Sure enough, in the parking lot and the line to get in, the Knicks jerseys, hats, and gear were everywhere. I'd have put it at 50/50, and the Knicks fans were hungry for a repeat, especially after we'd beaten them at home to kick off the season a few weeks earlier.

After food, merch, and finding our seats, we watched the rest of shooting practice and got ready for the game to start. And this is where the patriotic part comes in.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please stand if you are able, for the singing of our national anthem by Ron Brooks, the world's first double amputee to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout."

Brooks was in a wheelchair at center court, gripping the mic with fiery intensity, as we could see zoomed in on the monitor, and at distance, over the heads in front of us.

Stand if you are able has an added weight to it when the singer is in front of you, without legs, in a wheelchair. Everyone in our section rose to their feet.

Then he started in.

I won't go play-by-play on the lyrics. I'll just say that if you haven't seen him sing the national anthem, you should. Not because he's the greatest singer you've ever heard, but because he sings with more conviction in those words, in the fighting spirit behind them, and in the unifying sendoff they offer before a competition, than I've felt in the million other times I've stood for that song at an event, professional or otherwise.

A national anthem usually gets two cheers. The first comes at whatever note or flourish the singer puts on "the land of the free." The second comes at the end, which is as much for the performance as it is for the start of the game.

Ron Brooks got a cheer for almost every other line.

The song, the arena colors, the lyrics, the 50/50 crowd, the very fact that we were sitting in Philly, rooting for a team named after 1776, in the semiquincentennial year. We cheered for every other line, for this guy in a wheelchair singing the hell out of those words.

People were crying all around us. No talk of the midterms. No talk of politics. No concern, for a few minutes, about which team we'd be cheering for the rest of the night.

America is a spirit, and it's easy to forget that, easy to overlook it, when most of what you see on TV is attack ads and disappointing adults. America in the first person, in real life, still means something more, and Brooks made a room of about 20,000 people feel it on Friday night, as he's done so many times before. I feel very, very grateful for that this election morning.

Whatever happens after today, I want to remember it.

Here's the best-quality version I could find of him singing it, from 2019. And if you haven't googled his story yet, it's worth it.