Sometimes I feel silly about the contexts in which I think about football.

For instance, thinking about the Packers playing in Atlanta this week, I feel like I’m in a brand new life stage where everything is new for the first time. Liz and I recently celebrated our anniversary and I can’t help but think back to how life felt after we first got married. Even doing mundane things was exciting because every activity wasn’t just a thing unto itself, it was The First Time We Are Grocery Shopping as a Married Couple or whatever.

The reason I thought about that this week was because the Packers have quite a bit of baggage — both good and bad — in the city of Atlanta. In the playoffs alone, there’s both the 2010 Divisional Round game and the 2016 NFC Championship, two games about as diametrically opposed in terms of outcome as you could get. But there are others: the Packers also played a tough game in the road in Atlanta in the regular season 2010, then returned there in 2011 for a solid win. The Packers also got the short end of the stick in Atlanta in both 2016 and 2017 in the regular season.

But what’s the common thread for all of these games? Aaron Rodgers was the quarterback. Even if there’s significant historical baggage there, in a way that all left town with Rodgers. Everything is new again, and the possibilities feel endless.

Of course, all of that only matters to fans; you can count on two fingers the number of players on the roster today who were present for the Packers’ losses in 2016: David Bakhtiari and Kenny Clark. As far as I can tell, Jerry Montgomery was the only coach who was around for those games. There was plenty of front office staff around for those years, but we’re getting pretty far removed from the field at that point.

What I’m saying is this: it’s exciting that things feel new, but the newness only matters if you’re a fan, and even then only if you’re a fan of a certain age. It feels silly in that context, but I suppose if we start thinking about everything in sports that’s a little bit silly, suddenly we’re going to feel silly a lot.

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