When you’re from Detroit, you get used to losing.

The Detroit Pistons just capped a 28-game losing streak, the longest in sports history. At my college, the University of Michigan, about an hour from Detroit, we used to joke that college football coach Bo Schembechler ate his cereal from a box because he’d lose it in a bowl. When the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984, we nearly burned the city down in celebration (after the mini-riot, the Detroit Free Press ran a political cartoon showing a Tigers fan standing atop a smoldering rubble heap wearing a “We’re No. 1!” styrofoam mitten).

But last week, the Wolverines won their first outright national championship since the mid-1900s — without anarchy. And last night, the Detroit Lions won their first playoff game in eight decades. In other news, dogs and cats are staging a love-in music festival and Republicans believe in evolution.

I’ve never been one for hyperbole, but that’s the most surprising thing in the history of histories. This is a miracle on the scale of loaves and fishes, people. Detroit football fans don’t need sunscreen; they wear paper bags.

But Michigan has held some surprises of late. It elected a Democrat as governor — a female governor at that. Downtown Detroit has enjoyed a resurgence because owning property is the new whip. Homicides are down from 500 a year to about 250. And it has Eminem.

Not that it’s yet time to retire in Hamtramck. I checked the weather today and the temperature was two. American cars remain pieces of shit. I’m told you still don’t want to linger in the Motor City after dark. And it has Eminem.

But given what sports typically means in Detroit, especially football, last night’s victory came straight from the storybooks.

Loaves and fishes.