Every Vikings Fan's Story

Episode One: Training Camp

Vikings football - Is it just a game?

Football.

It’s just a game.

The National Football League.

It’s just an organization flooded with over-paid, murdering, sexually harassing, arrogant, stupid, athletic boys who never turned into men.

Is that true?

Or…

Could it be that there’s something almost sacred about football, and undeserving boys simply invade it – like sin in the Garden of Eden?

I know individuals on both sides of the argument. I understand fans pour their money and attention into a game, while billions of people live on less than $2 a day. I get it.

But I also cried myself to sleep on January 24, 2010, after watching Drew Brees and the Saints capitalize on a turnover-plagued Vikings performance – a game, which aside from pure New Orleans fate should have been won by the purple from the North.

Why?

Why do I watch interviews of training camp from a team that has done nothing but lose three NFC championships in my lifetime? I’m not talking about those fans that have replica Super Bowl rings they can hold and reminisce with whenever they please. I’m talking about those of us who bleed purple and gold (or perhaps you poor blue and white bleeders). I’m talking about those of us who sit and squat and stand and jump and crumble in our living rooms year after year as yet another title evades us, sometimes by 16 games (again, I’m sorry Lions fans), and sometimes by a wide left field goal from the foot of a perfect kicker or 12 men on the field in the closing seconds.

Why?

Why am I sitting in bed, listening to emotional music, praying to God that this is the year the Vikings might win the Super Bowl?

Because it’s not just a game. Not even close.

When I sit in my living room, willing Christian Ponder to complete that pass, grunting as Adrian Peterson strives to break another tackle, something is happening to me. Somehow (I’m not sure exactly how), when they succeed, so do I.

That’s how I know it’s not just a game. I know it’s not a waste of time. Because when the Vikings lose, they mourn with me in my failures in life as well. And when they win, together we forget the bad things, we forget the yesterdays and celebrate the future.

And when they bring that title to Minnesota, whether it be February of 2014 or when I’m a 75-year-old grandpa in a rocking chair – on that day, I will know that anything is possible.