The relentless victory of Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs

The latest great American dynasties

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On Sunday night, America watched the final act of the real life romantic comedy called Gimme All The Trophies (2024), starring Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Taylor Swift has, for two decades now, been the star of her own reality show. But this was something that not even she, the CIA, nor the NFL writers’ room could script.

After winning her fourth Album of the Year Grammy (no other artists has won more than three) and her fourteenth Grammy overall, Swift watched her boyfriend win his third Super Bowl in four years. They kissed on the field and held each other for a long time afterward.

As Kelce yelled, “you’ve gotta fight for you right to party” and sang Viva Las Vegas into Jim Nantz’s mic, Swift appeared to be holding back tears. There are countless videos of Swift and Kelce at afterparties, dancing to Swift’s own songs while DJs remix them. The best parts of these videos are Jason Kelce, Travis’ Super Bowl-winning brother (and podcast co-host), stumbling into bushes wearing a Rey Mysterio (he is a wrestler) mask and Chiefs-colored overalls.

The last time I saw Taylor Swift at a Super Bowl event was in 2017, the night before the New England Patriots were set to face the Atlanta Falcons.

Swift played a concert in some strange, dystopian warehouse on the outskirts of Houston. The show was sponsored by DirecTV; AT&T had just acquired the company for a bajillion dollars. DirecTV was paying Swift an undisclosed (but what was understood to be an exorbitant) sum of money for a channel devoted solely to her and her music.

At the time, Swift was in her Reputation Era, hiding from public view. America had grown tired of her ubiquity and success since the release of her album 1989 and turned on her. In the fall of 2016, a public feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West provided the final nail in her reputation’s coffin.

Super Saturday Night (as the DirecTV party was so cleverly called) was the only concert Swift would play in 2017. In fact, it was one of the only times she appeared in public from November 2016 to November 2017, when she finally released her album reputation.

Despite being exhausted from a week of Super Bowl-related activities and writing about them, I went to this party. Because I was in my 20s. At the time, the only thing worse than being tired was missing out on something (hard to imagine as I am happily sitting at home in my mid-30s — life comes at you fast).

As I watched Swift perform, I tweeted this: