The Super Bowl is a game. Life is for real. What I went through helped me get to where I am today. I won’t forget. I can’t forget. Because a man who forgets his past sometimes loses his soul and forgets where to go in the future.

Seau contrasts the spectacle and stakes of the Super Bowl with the deeper, enduring stakes of lived experience. The repetition—“I won’t forget. I can’t forget.”—frames memory not as nostalgia but as moral and spiritual necessity: the past, including hardship, forms identity and provides direction. His warning that forgetting can mean “los[ing] his soul” suggests that self-knowledge and integrity depend on acknowledging where one has been, especially the struggles that shaped resilience. The quote also implicitly critiques the tendency to treat athletic achievement as ultimate meaning, insisting instead that sport is transient while character, purpose, and the lessons of adversity are lasting.