Like many of you, I went into last weekend assuming we’d see the usual suspects in the College Football Playoff national championship game. Once I watched Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide steamroll Notre Dame this past weekend in the Rose Bowl and advance out of the semifinals, I couldn’t block out the deja vu sentiments of an Alabama versus Clemson matchup taking place in the national title game for the fourth time in six years.

The final days of December always create the perfect opportunity for reflection. This year stretched us beyond belief—pushing many of us outside our comfort zones to accept roles and responsibilities far different from how we began the first few months. The NFL gave us a prime example of the adjustments needed to promote and encourage team growth. As we close the books on the 2020 regular season, I was reminded this past weekend that it features a 16-year journeyman backup quarterback named Ryan Fitzpatrick still rocking the burly beard and electrifying a franchise that has suffered through a 20-year postseason victory outage.

When most Americans see a game of rugby for the first time, they think of the sport as a brutal and baffling event, akin to football without the protection of helmets and pads. Not Brian Moynihan. An avid rugby player from the time he was an 18-year-old freshman at Brown to the time he was a 32-year-old rising superstar in business, Moynihan sees beauty in an eight-man scrum.

Every holiday season brings about a personal practice in which I do an evaluation of my inner circle—acknowledging the partnerships that push me to be better and identifying the relationships that hinder my success. Focusing on the people we surround ourselves with most gives us an indicator of how or why things turned out either positive or negative in the prior year and portends what lies ahead.