In case you haven’t heard, the Atlanta Falcons are headed to the Super Bowl.

They play the New England Patriots Feb. 5 in Houston.

This is just the second Super Bowl in team history, the previous one coming in 1999.

In a calendar year that included the Cleveland Cavaliers winning the NBA championship and the Chicago Cubs taking the World Series, it seems that long suffering fans have finally seen a little piece of heaven.

Not many have suffered as much in the National Football League as the Atlanta Falcons.

According to Albert Einstein, adversity introduces a man to himself.

If that is indeed the case, the Atlanta Falcons are not only on a first name basis with the Atlanta Falcons, but they go out for dinner once per week.

Longtime Falcons fans have come to believe that this dinner is on Sunday, is usually from 1-4 p.m. and takes place at The Varsity. It certainly wasn’t going on inside anything resembling a football stadium.

We’ve suffered. We’ve suffered a lot. So much so that I wouldn’t be surprised that the patron saint of football is Jessie Tuggle.

Tuggle, undrafted from Valdosta State, played 14 years with Atlanta. Twice he recorded more than 200 tackles in a season and had 185 and 193 in two other seasons.

Tuggle’s years with the team included highs and lows. In 1998, the team won 14 games and missed in the Super Bowl. His other 13 years included exactly two winning seasons; three times the Falcons won three games over that span.

(A quick Google search indicates the patron saint of athletics is actually St. Sebastian, but his defensive teammates didn’t include Eugene Robinson. Thus, Tuggle is more appropriate.)

Speaking of Robinson, he is perhaps the epitome of the Falcons’ existence.

The year was 1999.

Atlanta was in its first Super Bowl, following a miracle NFC championship victory over the Minnesota Vikings. On the day prior to the big game against the Denver Broncos, Robinson was given the Bart Starr Award, an honor NFL uses to celebrate character in the community.

Later that night, Robinson was arrested for solicitation.

The Falcons lost, 34-19.

The team then couldn’t even revel in being runners-up for a few games during the next season. Two games in, Jamal Anderson, who rushed for 1,846 yards in 1998, tore his ACL, ending his year.

Though Anderson bounced back for a 1,000-yard season in 2000, he suffered another ACL injury in 2001. That ended his career.

We’ve had a lot of that type of thing as Falcons fans — highs and lows — but mostly lows.

I recall one Sunday afternoon years ago — it might have been the year that Byron Hanspard and Ken Oxendine were the squad’s two best running back options — that my father looked over at me and apologized for raising me a Falcons fan.

Dad carried a dagger, too.

Not a real one (though as an educator, he probably pondered doing so), but an imaginary one, composed of nothing than a make believe hilt and thin air.

Every time Atlanta would be on the verge of doing something good, such as a first-and-goal situation, he’d remove the dagger from an equally imaginary holster. The dagger was out and ready and in something akin to a Shakespearian scene, when the Falcons would fail at the task, the dagger would enter his side.

Being imaginary, it alas, never relieved him of the misery of yet another Atlanta failure.

The Falcons only notched two real actual back-to-back winning seasons after an 11-5 record in 2005 was followed by a 9-7 in 2009. The franchise had only been around since 1966.

I called Dad when the clock hit zero of that fateful day. I was living in Athens and helping a friend move, but I had to share the joy with him, as simple as it was. Something other teams might label as mediocrity.

Atlanta’s adversity has introduced me to myself a good bit.

I’ve learned a lot about forgiving and forgetting.

I forgive the franchise for trading away Brett Favre. He was stuck in the shadow of Chris Miller and Favre has admitted that his head wasn’t on straight at that time.

Could Favre have had a Hall of Fame career in Atlanta?

Andre Rison and Favre could have been a thing of beauty, but who’s to say Favre would have had the same magic? Favre was quite durable, but in Atlanta’s hands he could have turned into another Miller, brilliant, but oft-injured.

I forgive Bobby Petrino, who walked out as head coach of the team in 2007.

Petrino didn’t sign up for the mess he got. Michael Vick’s dogfighting charges emerged right before training camp and the Falcons’ players, fiercely loyal to Vick, seemingly stopped giving any effort on the field, unless it was to cheerlead Vick.

I forgive Vick, too.

The dogfighting charges and team disruption of 2007 led to a bad enough record to snag Matt Ryan as the third overall pick of the 2008 draft.

I’ll take that trade any day of the week.

Perhaps the Falcons can actually pull it off this time, win the big one. At this point in fandom, I’ll even take hanging in there for three quarters and tiring out in the fourth.

Perhaps I’m selling Atlanta short. I inherited that dagger.

Regardless of result, there is something we can all agree upon, however: No Dirty Bird this time.