Hawkflight Studios

Maybe it's over but it's been a heck of a ride

^{The last championship of my childhood} I consider my sports fan awakening to be the second week of January in 1986. While my father was athletic, he never cared for professional sports. My mother was a mild Red Sox fan, but neither parent was likely to put a game on the TV. I would guess that golf and tennis were more common than the four major sports leagues when I was little. However, this particular week there was a buzz in my 3rd grade class. Everyone seemed to be going crazy and chanting the phrase "Squish the Fish". The impressionable youth I was latched on and became aware that our local football team was playing an important game on Sunday to advance to the championship.

The plucky group of players, the New England Patriots, were big underdogs. I did not watch the game myself. Or if I did, I don't remember it at all. However, I did find out they won and school for the next two weeks was a whirlwind of excitement. The Patriots would go on to get embarrassed by one of the best teams ever, but my family did watch Super Bowls so my little heart got to break in real time. This time it didn't linger long due to the events that happened two days later.

^{The Snow Bowl, though people call this game by another name} But that wasn't all that 1986 had in store for me. Over the summer, I got to watch the Celtics win what would be their final championship for 22 years. Then in October, the real pain happened. Of all the teams, my mom and her extended family loved the Red Sox the most. My mom would drive me into Boston once a year to watch a game in person. This year, the Sox made it to the World Series only for Bob Stanley to throw away the game on a wild pitch. (Bill Buckner got a bad wrap and I had this opinion before 2004.) All four teams would struggle over the next decade. This, combined with my having moved to New Mexico for high school caused me to be looser with my fandom that I would accept today. There's a well-known family picture of me at my annual Red Sox game wearing a St. Louis Cardinals hat.

My second awakening would come in 1995 when I moved back to Boston for a year. I was working a warehouse job and had a standard Monday-Friday work week. Sundays were free and they guys at work were big on sports so it was great to talk with them about what was going on. When the football season started up, I had my first season where I watched every Pats game. This just happened to be the year that the Patriots would return to the Super Bowl against the Packers. Though they didn't win, they had a much better showing.

^{The ALCS was almost sweeter than the Series} When I returned to New Mexico for college, my friend group had a huge Broncos fan and she hosted Super Bowl parties for the back-to-back championships they won for the '98 and '99 seasons. At this time, by friend and housemate Miguel would regularly go with me to a sports bar to watch games since the Pats were rarely shown on local channels. I distinctly remember going in to the 2001 season that I believed our team to be a 6-10 team. After an 0-2 start and having Drew Bledsoe go down, I thought for sure there was no way we'd win a game all year. What followed was the greatest ride of my life. I got to host the Super Bowl party that year and when Adam Vinatieri split the uprights to win it all, I threw down the chair I was sitting in and ran circles around the house.

I was grateful to get to move back to the Boston area after college in 2003 and enjoyed the first Pats dynasty, the breaking of the Curse, and the snapping of both the Bruins and Celtics droughts while there. Shortly after the Bruins won to give me a recent memory of all four teams winning, I had to head down to Florida for work. But since I was working for a company that made sports video games, my fandom was stronger than ever.

^{The Bruins made it all four teams in 7 years} The Patriots won Boston's last championship in February of 2019, and the Bruins fell one game short that summer. Since then Boston's "City of Champions" title is being challenged by LA. I started a tradition in 2004 where I'd bring all of my souvenir championship hats to work after the finals. When I started I had 5 hats. Today I have 31. I've been exceedingly lucky to have gotten to witness what will probably be Boston's greatest era in sports. But I certainly wouldn't mind another championship here and there.

^{Hat collection in 2011}

^{Hat collection in 2019}