This week, the NFL and the Christian humanitarian organization World Vision are sending thousands of Super Bowl t-shirts and hats valued at over $10 million to to impoverished areas in Nicaragua. Just days after the Giants’ miraculous Super Bowl victory, children in the poorest and most remote villages in Nicaragua will get to don brand new Reebok-made Super Bowl gear. The Nicaraguans on the receiving end of the donation have never seen an NFL game, much less a television, much less, as the New York Post points out, a new shirt. But when I say “Super Bowl gear,” I don’t mean Giants championship apparel.

As merchandisers often produce items that predict the outcome of a big game before the result of the game has been cemented, often they are left with thousands of shirts emblazoned with slogans commemorating events that never occur, such as “New England Patriots, Champions, 19-0, Perfect Season.” But as the 97 million people who watched the Super Bowl this year know, the Patriots didn’t win the game and thus, didn’t go 19-0, didn’t have a perfect season, and aren’t “champions.” The Giants were the champions of Super Bowl XLII.

That doesn’t change the fact that the NFL printed loads of predictive “Perfect Season” apparel, threads that the NFL considered putting in incinerators or landfills. But in its partnership with World Vision, the NFL need not waste perfectly good clothing. They just have to get it out of the U.S. as soon as possible so it isn’t sold on eBay or even worse, in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot somewhere in Massachusetts. As the Augusta Chronicle reported, since 1994, World Vision has been sending erroneous Super Bowl gear to the Third World, to places like Zambia, Chad, Chile, Bolivia, Congo, El Salvador, Romania and Zimbabwe. As the Chronicle reporter wrote: “there are places in Africa where the locals believe the four-time Super Bowl losing Buffalo Bills are the greatest dynasty in American football.”

Imagining these Third World villages where everyone is wearing discarded Super Bowl gear seems kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Indeed, I can see Nicaraguan boys kicking a soccer ball down the street decked out head to toe in Patriots championship gear. One boy kicks the ball off to the side and the ball rolls to the feet of Rod Serling standing in the barrio smoking a cigarette. “Imagine if you will,” he begins, “a secluded road in a distant town in a remote country. Here there exists a fifth dimension, one which cannot distinguish the line between perfect and imperfect, 19-0 and 18-1, a dimension that blurs all preconceived notions of reality and fantasy, science and supposition, absoluteness and expectation. Here, young boys exalt a man named Brady for achieving perfection and wonder why Mama, Papa, Abuela and all the kids at school wear the exact same shirt and hat everyday. It is a region where children know not the difference between Peyton and Eli, Giselle and Montel, Patriots and Giants. It is a gap between consciousness and fantasy, a gap of the magnitude of that between Michael Strahan’s two front teeth. It is a place where those indifferent to the ways of the NFL appear to be the most impassioned of fans. Though every man, woman and child’s shirt here reads “perfect season,” all of the sign posts in this dilapidated dimension read…The Twilight Zone.”

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