While the Super Bowl is a distant memory (in the age of day-trading, instant e-mails and online newspapers, anything that took place more than a month ago is a distant memory), it is by no means too late to talk about a book and a man intimately connected to championship football games.
Let us not chide Cardinal Newman for writing in the middle of the 19th century instead of the middle of the 20th. But also let us not assume that what he had to say then had absolute and unconditioned validity for all such institutions in all times.