#7 Momentous Nostalgia
Who says Nostalgic Moments can't be Momentous?
Steve Steele
6/15/20268 min read
There's a kind of moment that doesn't announce itself.
It doesn't come with a trophy presentation or a standing ovation or a camera in your face. Nobody writes it up for the local paper. You don't plan it, and you probably won't even recognize it as significant when it happens. You'll just be living your life driving somewhere, doing something ordinary, saying something offhand and years later, someone will tell you that that was the moment. The one they kept. Or YOU will.
Momentous nostalgia can be the experience of looking back at a completely unremarkable Tuesday and realizing that something profoundly important was happening while you were just trying to get through the week. Or that you loved doing whatever you were doing at that time, without realizing it.
It happens at work. But it happens most quietly and most powerfully in families.
Saturday Morning Stooges
Many kids (my age or older at least) grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. However, some of my fondest memories were when AMC would have a Three Stooges Marathon on Saturdays. My Dad always loved watching the Stooges, and I would accompany him anytime I could. Everyone laughs at different kinds of funny (my mom and my wife do NOT laugh at the Stooges kind of funny), and for my Dad and I, the Stooges were it. One of our favorite episodes Three Little Pirates, sees them stranded on Dead Man's Island before they hatch an escape plan to dress up as wayfarers so they can get permission to leave the island. Curly became the Maharaja of Canarsie presiding over the lands of Coney and Long and gifted a "Ruby" called "Popskia" and the "Tusk of a Black Walrus" in return for permission to leave the island. Moe and Curly's routine in that episode is something my Dad and I have run through probably thousands of times over the years in random conversation.
Just over the past 6 months or so, I gave my own kids a taste of the Stooges...and the LOVE them. So much so that on their choice nights to pick shows, they sometimes choose a black-and-white show made 75 years ago over all the ultra-colorful and dopamine releasing cartoons of today. Granted the maturity level of the Stooges correlates well to a child (not sure what that says about my Dad and I), but it is good-hearted laughter. (Sidenote, it has taught my kids a lot about how much the world has changed. They have asked about the cars and phones when Curly tried to take a phone of the wall to bring it with them).
In our trip to Michigan to Grandma & Papa's house this year, Simon wanted to watch the Stooges with Papa. I will admit that seeing my Dad and son enjoy the Stooges together brought tears to my eyes, to see him enjoy one of the same things I enjoyed doing with him growing up. Even better was hearing the many Stooge'isms throughout the week, much to Grandma's dismay.
None of these moments were anything extravagant. Many of my memories watching with my Dad were just laughing in the living room or quoting the lines at random times they happened to fit throughout the day. Now getting to see my own children take part in those same moments truly makes them special. You could say it's a mini family "tradition" without anything formal or planned inside of it. I only hope that these moments of nostalgia mean as much to them one day as they do to me.
NCAA Football
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my (much older) brother John sending me a Boise State jersey and letter for a birthday present. That was a culminating momentous moment in our relationship as I truly started out on my own. However, that moment began in 2001 with the release (and at the time birthday present) of the PlayStation 2 gaming system and the release of EA Sports NCAA Football 2002 on it.
We played that game for hours. You could say the football was one of the ways that we both truly bonded over the years with him being an old man...I mean, 12 years older than me. He had helped coach some of my youth football teams, but playing NCAA was one of the ways I began to truly learn the game. We had all different kinds of setups we would do. We had a rule where you could be whoever you wanted, but once you lost with them you couldn't be them again until we had agreed we could start over. We tracked scores of every game and the longest streaks with teams. John had a great run with Duke at one point, and I had found a way to run with "Golden Flash Football" having an improbable run with Kent State.
Our connection over college football always carried into Bowl Season (RIP with the current state). He would be home for the holidays and we would spend hours either playing NCAA Football or watching NCAA Football. One of those games I will always remember was the 2007 Fiesta Bowl between Boise State and Oklahoma on New Year's Day. It was on very late in Michigan but we watched the whole Cinderella story unfold. We both enjoyed watching Hawaii at the time who was second fiddle to Boise State in the WAC Conference, but we were both excited at what Boise's upset win meant for college football. Little did I know at the time, that he would include this in his letter to me when I would start coaching at Dakota State.
As I stood in my apartment and read his letter years later, something shifted because someone who had known me my entire life had taken the time to stop, think about who I was and what I was going through, and put it into words. It brought back all the feels and memories of playing for him in youth football and against him in NCAA Football over the years. While I don't play it nearly as much as I did then, it was a reason for excitement when NCAA Football returned for the 2025 season, and with even more importance to me having players inside the game! I am excited for the 2027 game release which should include Lincoln Kienholz at Louisville, Jason Maciejczak at Wyoming, and Jett Zabel at North Dakota State.
That's momentous nostalgia. He made a moment built on the backs of all the NCAA games we played and watched over the years. He made that nostalgia mean something and come alive. And I have carried it with me for over a decade.
Gianna at the Airport
When I was selected for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Coaching Academy, an opportunity I hadn't expected and couldn't quite believe was real, my family drove me to the airport on a Sunday morning.
Gianna cried the whole way.
Not a little cry, the full thing. Every bit of Daddy's little girl, not understanding why he had to go, just knowing that he was leaving. Audrey handled it with the same grace she handles everything, essentially pushing me to take the opportunity while managing everything at home alone for a week with four kids.
I boarded the plane thinking about Gianna crying in the back seat.
I spent the week in Tampa learning from NFL coaches, working on the practice field with NFL Draft picks, acing a whiteboard session that left me quietly confident that I could operate at any level of football I chose. It was one of the most professionally affirming experiences of my life.
And one of the clearest things I remember from the whole week is what Todd Bowles, the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, chose to spend time talking to me about.
Not scheme. Not personnel. Not what it takes to make the NFL.
He talked to me about how to raise your children in the spotlight of coaching, while ensuring that your most important job of being a husband & father remains your most important job.
That conversation, from a man at the absolute top of his profession, lasted longer than anything tactical we discussed. He gave me his full attention. He spoke from experience and from genuine care. And what it told me, what I carried home, was that the most important things I would ever do would not happen on a football field. I could also sense the appreciation in his mind for that conversation, maybe with a bit of nostalgia of his own as he discussed his family. In the often cutthroat world that is the NFL, someone thinking of the potential butterfly effect of chasing that level rather than just trying to prove and finagle their way into it was a refreshing and genuine conversation.
I've had to travel a few times for work trips, and those tears still come, although in lesser quantities. Momentous nostalgia will visit me someday for Gianna's tears in that back seat. I don't know when. But I know they mattered more than anything I learned about football that week. Having the opportunity to professionally affirm my coaching abilities while at the same time be reminded what the most important things are in life was an experience I am so grateful for, and will never forget.
What Families Do That Leaders Forget
In the context of Momentous Leadership, I talk a lot about being intentional. About building moments with purpose. About not leaving the defining experiences of the people you lead entirely to chance.
Families mostly don't do any of that. Families create moments by accident. By showing up when it's inconvenient. By making one sentence land exactly right. By putting a birthday jersey in a box and writing down what they actually think of you. By crying in a car because they don't want you to go. Or watching a black-and-white show made 50 years before you were born.
The irony is that families, the places most of us are least intentional, are where the most powerful moments of our lives are made.
Chip and Dan Heath write about the "peak-end rule," the idea that we remember experiences based on their most emotionally intense moments and how they end, not their average. But in a family, you rarely know which moments are the peaks until years later. You're just living. And some unremarkable Wednesday turns out to be the one your kid talks about when they're forty.
That should terrify you a little. And it should also liberate you.
It means you don't have to engineer the perfect moment. You don't need a plan or a budget or a calendar reminder. You need presence. You need to put down what you're carrying long enough to actually be in the room. You need to know your people well enough that you know what they need, even when they can't ask for it.
Three generations of Steele boys laughing together, and adding inside jokes in conversation, warm the heart.
John knew I needed a jersey and a letter that said: I see you, and you're going to make it.
Gianna cried because she was going to miss me and it was the first time I would be away for an extended period of time, making sure I knew what was important.
None of them were following a framework. They were just paying attention to someone they loved.
The Moments You're Making Right Now
Here's what momentous nostalgia teaches you, if you let it: the moments that will matter most to your kids, your spouse, your siblings, your parents, many of them are happening right now. This week. In the ordinary chaos of your ordinary life.
You won't know which ones they are. That's the point.
So the only answer is to be there. Fully there. Not partially there while your mind is somewhere else, on the next game, the next meeting, the next problem that needs solving. Fully, actually, physically and emotionally present in the room where your people are.
The field and office are where I work.
Home is where the real moments live.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Think of a moment from your childhood that has stayed with you for years. Something a parent or sibling did that probably seemed small to them at the time. Have you ever told them what it meant to you?
When was the last time you were fully present with the people in your home. Not physically present, but mentally and emotionally all the way there? What pulled you away?
Momentous nostalgia works in both directions: the moments you'll be grateful for, and the ones you'll wish had gone differently. Which of those are you creating right now, today?
If your kids were asked twenty years from now what they remember most about growing up with you, what would you want them to say and is how you're living right now pointing toward that answer?