The 1997 Season

Note: 1997 was the first season that I wrote down thoughts the entire year. Therefore, the 1997 season summary will come in multiple additions to my blog. Today's 1997 entry will be Week 4, at Green Bay thoughts.

Week Four: at Green Bay

Beating the Green Bay Packers has for years been called a Minnesota Viking fan’s “crowning glory”, but to every Viking fan who speaks of his intimate relationship with this rivalry, a loss can be a nightmare.

I don’t know any Viking fan who really takes a loss to the Cheese well. They usually just cope. This rivalry can be a living, powerful, mercurial, metaphysical energy force to be respected, reckoned with, and reconciled to, but the game’s outcome cannot be controlled any more than atomic fusion.

Occasionally, the game can be cajoled into becoming a rout (we refer to these lapses as “the ball’s bouncing our way today”) but it can never be coerced. Think of all the time, money, creative energy, and emotion we invest in our football team. Yet most of the time it insists on expressing its wishes, not necessarily ours. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted from battles waged every weekend on the gridiron, and the battle in Week Four was not the least of them.

Most football fans exist under a collective hallucination termed “on any given Sunday.” We have all been brainwashed that if we can get the right quarterback, running back, middle linebacker, place kicker, coach, and owner, our team will finally behave like it should and win a Super Bowl. Each year we would have a Super Bowl champion if we could just have certain key elements filled in. But that’s not real life for me, nor probably is it for you.

On any given game day, the Vikings never look the way they did the week before. They had yet to learn how to simultaneously play a good game offensively while doing the same on defense and special teams and vice versa. They can pass and score, run and score, intercept and score, but never on the same day, let alone the same half. Some days the team looks wonderful; other days, woebegone. Yet the process is virtually the same. Losing humbles us, and we need to make peace with it.

The way we do this is to accept the defeat and acknowledge the Vikings whether they lose by one or by thirty. Getting to know your team and working with them instead of constantly fighting them is the first step toward rapprochement and peace of mind.

While my alter-ego wears his hair in shoulder-length, Scandinavian blond braids, I’ve had to reconcile myself to the fact that the Vikings aren’t going to win every game this season, and I will be heckled at home and away for the way I dress at games. We will all have game days when we will scream, “Fire the owner, fire the coach, get rid of the place-kicker,” but those aren’t the days on which to do it.

Remember, the team you know is easier to handle than the team you don’t. But be open to change because there are few joys in life that can equal finally achieving the perfect season. And if the worst happens, after you dry your eyes, remember it’s only a game. It will come around again and you will be wiser. And so will our players.

While I’m sure many of you turned off your television or radio at half-time to do Sunday chores, thinking the game was over, the Viking players went to the locker room and obtained a self-confidence potion that was heavily scented with attitude, optimism and faith; later they gained experience, knowledge and wisdom through a loss.

But today we now know that every new challenge awaiting our team will be meet by an attitude of self-confidence even while most Viking fans’ self-confidence will be hanging in a closet. So next time we fall behind, act as though you are self-confident and the team will take you as such.

Above all, learning to accept the occasional defeat is part of the process of learning to love your team. A poet once said, “Your thorns are the best part of you,” and she was right.