I think I’ve told this story in a blog post before, but since few of you read this, and you like me enough to listen to me tell a story I love multiple times,
I didn’t watch much football at all until we moved to Puerto Rico. I knew my Papa watched football and like the Green Bay Packers and the Miami Dolphins. And then we moved. We had cable, we had a sega genesis, and I was homesick.
I particularly missed snow.
And one cloudy Sunday afternoon, I was flipping channels. The Green Bay Packers were playing, and it was snowing. It was a cloudy, cool-for-Puerto-Rico afternoon. I dropped the blinds to make the room a little darker, and watched the snow fall.
There was a game happening, too, but for me it was all about the snow falling. And for a few minutes, it felt like maybe, just maybe, if I imagined hard enough, it would really be snowing outside. It was awesome.
And that, dear friends, is how I started watching football. I met a girl later who really like the West Virginia Mountaineers, and I started to understand some of the rules. You know, so I could impress her. But the true origin of my love for football was creating an environment in my living room where I could pretend for just a moment that it was snowing outside.