Growing Up Vikings
Me and the team were both born in 1961 in the frozen north, and it's been an excruciatingly marvelous disastrous ride with lots more pain in store this season.
My standard disclaimers first:
If your NFL team has won a championship in your lifetime, you can’t possibly relate.
Further, if you didn’t go through four Super Bowl defeats in your formative teen years, and that’s only gonna be me and my age Minnesota peers, and a similar segment of the Bills fanbase, you have no idea. None. Zero. It’s my friends who are Cowboys fans of similar age who think their team is cursed or nobody understands the suffering… lol. Amateurs all of you. Please. Show a little respect here.
Being in my age group, and a Minnesota Vikings fan, is about as hard a ride as there has ever been in sports. Ours is a unique suffering. It’s not a Cubs or Lions thing. Those teams pop their heads out of the sand once in a blue moon to take a shot. That’s suffering but it’s different. You can ignore your team for large stretches.
No - we’re always there. Always around it. And we just can’t get it done. And more - the nature of some of the epic playoff defeats are without peer. No team has won more North Division Titles. No team in football has had this much success without winning a Super Bowl.
No - it’s gonna be hard for you to hear me. Unless you had a kicker who didn’t miss a field goal all year - ALL YEAR - in fact - he’d hit his previous 122 kicks - only to miss an easy one that would have sent the team to the Super Bowl. OR - your team took a 12 men in the huddle penalty in the dying seconds of another NFC title game that changed the next call from run to pass - and then a pick on that subsequent play that cost you another Super Bowl berth.
That’s Growing Up Vikings.
And, like all self-respecting and abused Vikings fans, I’m pretty sure, there’s lots more where that came from. And add a QB who hasn’t played an NFL regular season down to the mix - and - what could possibly go wrong?
