CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — The Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home of Alex Quintana looks like a house divided with both Eagles and Chiefs flags flying off the front porch. The reality though is it is a house united behind Jason and Travis Kelce.
"Oh my gosh, it's a dream come true," Quintana said. "It's something you never would expect. I mean these young men have been record breakers ever since they were children."
That's when Quintana first met them when he opened his barber shop and began cutting their hair. The flags he fly are in celebration of them and he said a celebration of Cleveland Heights.
"I think that the only place in Ohio that the sun was shining was in Cleveland Heights," he said.
The matchup between Jason and Travis Kelce will be the first time two brothers have faced each other in the Super Bowl.
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The boys' father, Ed Kelce, will tell you the sun is shining in Philadelphia as well.
"Holy cow, I can't believe this is actually happening," Kelce said about what was going through his head after watching Jason's Eagles defeat the San Francisco 49ers for the NFC Championship. His son Travis and the Kansas City Chiefs later beat the Cincinnati Bengals for the AFC Championship.
"I actually left with, like, seven minutes left in the fourth quarter," Kelce said of the Eagles game so he could walk over to a South Philadelphia bar where he could watch the Chiefs game with his son Jason doing the same after the Eagles celebrations were wrapped. "So Jason, as soon as he got cleaned up, I know they had a lot of stuff on the field right afterward. He probably got over for middle of the second quarter."
He hadn't yet talked to Travis after the win, but he spent part of his Monday morning over at Jason's house. Did they talk about the win or the first-of-its-kind Super Bowl showdown between two brothers? No, he said; his granddaughters were up.
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"We didn't talk about football because the girls, the babies were up, so it was all about what the girls are doing and what we're going to do with the garden and this or that."
As a football family, the Kelce family dealt with the highs that came along with the wins and the lows with the losses, both of which their boys will deal with in the Super Bowl.
"One of my kids is going to get another ring and one's going to go home brokenhearted that he didn't beat his brother," he joked.
Since both play offense, the plan will be to root for whatever offense is on the field at the time and don't look for him to be wearing either boy's jersey, at least from the pros.
"I have two jerseys that I'll take with me to wear at different times depending on what the event is. One is from the University of Cincinnati," he said about where the Kelces played their college ball. "It has Travis' number on the front and Jason's on the back. I also have last year, when the Chiefs came to Philadelphia, I had some jerseys made up and they were replicas of Heights High jerseys from the time whenever the style when the boys were there. And so I had those duplicated with No. 1 on the back and a different number on the front."
Kelce shared on social media a few years back a photo of his boys playing on their front lawn in their replica Bernie Kosar uniforms. We asked him if he could have ever imagined the careers they would have and the history they would make.
"No, you can't really think that something like that could happen— I mean what are the odds— I mean realistically," he said. "But yeah, always in the back of your mind you're thinking 'this is going to be great if they ever do this.'"
This article was written by John Kosich for WEWS.
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