Blog
How a CRT TV, a Ditch, and the Internet Made Me a Lifer
Mon, Aug 24
I didn't choose this team. This team was installed in me, like factory firmware, before I was old enough to consent to anything.
My first memory of this franchise is Super Bowl XXVI, watching it alone on a television so deep it should've had its own zip code. I was a little kid. My dad was already a lifer by then, the kind of fan who'd call after a big play just to confirm you'd seen it too, like you might have somehow missed the whole thing. I didn't understand football yet. I understood that the game was on, my dad and I were talking about it, and that was apparently how the world was supposed to feel on a Sunday. I've spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling back, mostly unsuccessfully, for three decades running.
Fast forward to 16 years old, and I meet the woman who is now my wife. On our very first in-person game together, she gets us tickets on the 50-yard line, front row. Sixteen-year-old me had no framework for what a reasonable second date looked like, and she set the bar directly into orbit, never to be touched again by any human woman on earth. Every date since has technically been a disappointment by comparison, and she knows it, and she still married me anyway. That's either love or a filing error.
That was right before Gibbs 2.0, when my fandom stopped being a hobby and became a personality disorder. I graduated college, moved out of my parents' house, and landed walking distance from bars in my hometown, which is a sentence that should come with a surgeon general's warning. There was a Redskins-Cowboys game. There was a flood. There was a ditch. I would like to say I remember exactly how I ended up in it, drunk, mid-game, at a bar that had already personally offended me, but I don't, and neither does anyone else who was there, which is honestly for the best for all parties involved. I have grown since then. Some. A little. Enough to know better and still not always do better.
But also: Clinton Portis. That touchdown run in Gibbs 2.0. I still see it when I close my eyes at night, unprompted, like a war flashback except good. Oh, baby.
Somewhere in there I found The Warpath (thewarpath.net, go say hi, tell them I sent you), and became one of those guys who is suspiciously online about a football team. I met people there who are, to this day, some of my closest friends on the planet. We met on a message board about a mediocre-to-good NFL franchise. I understand how that sounds. I have accepted how that sounds.
Here's the story I tell when people ask what that actually means: right around the time I was getting ready to propose to my wife, those guys (internet strangers I'd known for what was, in hindsight, not that long) insisted on all meeting up for one insane overnight in Niagara Falls, barely knowing each other in person. Any one of them could have quietly murdered me in my sleep and no jury in the country could've pieced together the motive. Instead we just had a great, ridiculous night, and then they flew home the next day while I flew to San Diego and proposed on my own. We've talked almost every single day since: AOL Instant Messenger, then Gchat, now Slack, an entire generation's worth of chat platforms held together by one shared, ridiculous football team.
My wife has paid the toll for all of this. Game days are sacred in a way that borders on religious observance. I will not confirm or deny whether, over the course of our marriage, I have slowly and lovingly Jedi-mind-tricked her into caring about this team. What I will say is that she cheers now. Genuinely. Whether that's love, Stockholm syndrome, or just twenty-plus years of proximity to my nonsense, I've stopped asking questions and started being grateful.
That's the fandom. Wood paneling to Slack, a ditch to a proposal, one dad's old CRT to whatever this website turns into. Thanks for being here for it.
Who I actually am, in pictures
These are Virginia Saturdays, not Sundays, which I recognize is a strange thing to hang at the bottom of a post about the Commanders. Same instinct as the ditch and the CRT. Better chairs.
