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A brilliant idea is helping anti-Trump Patriots fans feel good supporting their team.

Trump's favorite team is headed back to the Super Bowl. Let's hope for #AGoodGame.

Donald Trump loves the New England Patriots, and the Patriots (or at least their owners, head coach, and star quarterback) love him back.

Quarterback Tom Brady infamously kept a "Make America Great Again" hat in his locker during the 2015 season. The following year, head coach Bill Belichick wrote a letter Trump read on-stage during a rally, gushing about how great the future president was. Owner Robert Kraft even gave the commander-in-chief a Super Bowl ring after the team won in 2017.

While most of the team's fans probably don't care too much about the political leanings of their favorite athletes — at least enough to affect how they feel about the game — some, very reasonably, do feel a bit conflicted.


Trump poses with Patriots coach Bill Belichick during a ceremony honoring the team for winning the 2017 Super Bowl. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

So last year, two Patriots fans decided to put their own feelings of conflict to good use before the Super Bowl, raising $100,000 in the process.

Pats fans Josh Gondelman and Emma Sandoe came up with a brilliant idea in their quest to root for their problematic football fave: They'd donate money to a good cause every time the Patriots score.

Gondelman pledged $100 for every Patriots touchdown and $50 for every Patriots field goal to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, sending the group a total of $500. Sandoe pledged $5 to Planned Parenthood for every Patriots point, bringing her total to $170. Others jumped in on the action as well, making pledges in various amounts to various charities. By night's end, according to Sandoe, people on the #AGoodGame hashtag had committed more than $100,000 to charity.

Socially-conscious sports fans Sandoe and Gondelman.

With the Patriots back in the Super Bowl, I caught up with Sandoe and Gondelman (full disclosure, I know Josh from Twitter — you should follow him) to see what they had in store for #AGoodGame, part two. They didn't disappoint.

Asked why she thinks last year's campaign took off the way it did, Sandoe says she believes "deep down people want an opportunity to turn negative feelings into something positive and constructive."

"Certainly, being on Twitter, being politically active, or just being alive in 2018 can often feel like a negative experience,  and this gave people that avenue to turn it into something positive, even without the football aspects," she adds.

For this year's iteration, the duo launched the A Good Game website, where people can log their own pledges for this year's Super Bowl. The simple site, put together by Ronik Design, also offers a bit of background on the project as well as a list of some of Sandoe and Gondelman's suggested charities.

This time around, Gondelman's donations will be going to the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic, and Sandoe's will support the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Tom Brady lifts the Super Bowl trophy after the Patriots 34-28 win over the Falcons in the 2017 Super Bowl. Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images.

Being a sports fan in a politically heated year like 2018 can be tough, but we all have our ways of working through it.

The #AGoodGame campaign is just one of several examples of people dealing with some of the unease that happens when someone or something we love does something that makes us feel uncomfortable.

Take the 2016 World Series, for example. With the baseball season winding to a close, the Chicago Cubs looked like they had a legitimate shot at winning their first World Series championship since 1908. As they got ready to head into the playoffs, the team traded for Aroldis Chapman, one of the league's best relief pitchers. Many fans cheered, convinced that Chapman would lead the team to victory; others were a bit more conflicted, though it had nothing to do with baseball.

At the tail-end of the 2015 season, Chapman allegedly fired a handgun eight times, once into the open window of a car, and choked his girlfriend. While he was eventually suspended for 30 games, he never quite owned up to his actions. The Cubs' decision to acquire someone facing credible domestic violence allegations left some fans wondering whether it was worth winning a World Series if that was the cost.

Cubs fan Caitlin Swieca reconciled her love for the team with her disdain for domestic violence by launching #pitchin4DV, pledging $10 to domestic violence organizations every time Chapman recorded a save (one of the key stats for relief pitchers). Others joined in the movement, and helped raise $38,670. The Cubs did win the World Series that season, and Chapman did play a key role for the team down the stretch — and some really great charities made a bit of money along the way.

Chapman celebrates the Cubs 8-7 win over the Cleveland Indians in Game Seven of the 2016 World Series. Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images.

There's an important lesson in all of this: If you look for it, there's usually something positive that can come out of negative situations if you're willing to act.

As the Chapman example showed, this isn't just about Donald Trump. In fact, maybe you love Donald Trump. Either way, you can still get in on these #AGoodGame-type campaigns as well. Gamification can be a lot of fun, as anyone who's ever owned a FitBit can confirm, and it's part of why people love to play Fantasy Football so much. That's the driving concept behind these campaigns: combining charity with sports for a better world. Give it a try!

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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