Picking the Super Bowl - Memories
I have vivid memories of the Packers’ three Super Bowl appearances in my lifetime, and I’m sure you do, too. I think what I’m most grateful for is that I got to experience the Packers’ appearances at very different points in my life, and I think that shows up in my feelings about the games.
Super Bowl XXXI has a very rosy tint of youthful innocence in my mind. As a kid, your team is the Good Guys and the opponents are the enemy. At least, that’s how it was for me. Who would even root for the Patriots anyway? I certainly didn’t know any Patriots fans; they must not exist. (It didn’t occur to me that there was practically no reason that I would know a Patriots fan as an eight-year-old in eastern Wisconsin. I knew like three dozen people, total, and most of them had lived in Wisconsin their whole lives. Why would they be Patriots fans?)
But as the Good Guys, the Packers’ win in Super Bowl XXXI was inevitable. Of course they’d win! Of course Brett Favre would make a couple of dazzling touchdown passes. Of course Desmond Howard would return a kickoff for a score. Of course Reggie White would dominate down the stretch. How could it have been any different?
A year later, I carried that same kind of feeling into Super Bowl XXXII — to a much different result. In hindsight, it was a good lesson in a very basic fact of football: the enemy gets a say. The Broncos had a plan for Reggie White and LeRoy Butler. They knew what they had to do to slow down Brett Favre. They knew that sacrificing Terrell Davis’ brain would bring them a Super Bowl Championship. (Yeah, spare me the story about his “migraine” after a hit to the head. Sure, guys.)
But I didn’t know these things as a nine-year-old Packers fan. I just knew that when Brett Favre’s final pass fell to the turf, something had gone wrong. There had to be some kind of mistake. It shouldn’t have been this way.
“It’s a lot quieter out this year, huh,” my dad said as we returned home from my grandparents’ house.
A lot of those good guys vs. bad guys feelings faded as I grew up. But as an early 20-something, that feeling returned for Super Bowl XLV. I was finishing up my last year of college at a small school in Minnesota, and boy was vindication ever on my mind. Enduring the 2009 season with Brett Favre as a Minnesota Viking was torture, and with the Packers on life support in the middle of the 2010 season, it looked like things would never turn around.
But, of course, they did, and I got to see my Packers take home the ultimate prize surrounded by Vikings fans on the campus of the college where I’d had to put up with a lot of not-so-playful jabs over the last couple of years. The Vikings’ trophy case, by the way, is still empty. “Two Super Bowls in 30 years!!!!1!!” they yell today. How about zero championships ever?
Anyway, another Super Bowl is here. The Packers aren’t there, but I can’t help but think about how other fans elsewhere might be shaped by this experience. Maybe there’s a young Eagles fan out there who’s going to have a fandom-shaping experience this weekend. Maybe a Chiefs fan has been going through a rough patch and will get just the pick-me-up they need. Yeah, it’s not what I’d have hoped for at the start of the season, but it’s just sports. If you can’t find some happiness for people in their big moment, that probably says more about you than them.
Except for Vikings fans. I hope they’re sad forever.