taking your sports team with you

I've never been a huge sports fan. Admittedly, I think much of my discontent with sports had to do with the fact that I grew up in a town with a lousy football team that promised the world and delivered nothing but an excuse to call them the "Aints". They had their own theme songs, and big advertisements on the side of the city buses. They had obsessed fans like any other pro team, although I would think that traditional Saints fans were even more fanatical to stick by a team that was suffering through such a bad losing streak for so long.

Another team with fanatical support (and perhaps one of the most dedicated fan bases around) has to be the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Regardless of where I am living, I still see the big red "N" everywhere I go. It doesn't matter if you're in the West, East, North or South...they take their fandom very seriously and they take it with them wherever they go. The Huskers have earned this respect from their fans though, and do for college football what the Beatles did for pop music. It's like they are super beings from outer space or something, given their track record.

I also had a college professor who was quite obsessed with the Florida Gators. So obsessed, in fact, that he managed to hire fellow Gator football fans as fellow colleagues when he became the chair of his department. It was rather comical. The Gators' record isn't too shabby, either, what with three national championships under their belt now.

While living in Denver, we had the Bronco fans who went so far as to state that God made the sunsets blue and orange because he, too, was a Bronco fan. We also had the naked bearded "barrel" man...I won't gross you out with the details.

None-the-less, I am excited because I have decided to take my kids to their first pro baseball game. They've never been to a "real" stadium before, and I expect that we'll do all of the things that you see in campy movies during the sports game montage...hopefully we'll get lucky and catch a fly ball like they do in every movie, too. Although we aren't avid fans, this won't prevent us from having a good time, waiving around foam fingers, screaming our heads off, and making complete fools of ourselves. Then I'll buy the kids some overpriced and overcooked footlongs loaded with all kinds of artery-clogging gunk and they'll go home with a pleasant life-long memory and mustard-stained fingertips.

Now it's just a matter of buying tickets for the last game of the season, in the hopes that the weather won't still be so unbearably hot.