<waxing philosophical>

Like many other people I am saddened by the Packers loss to the Seahawks yesterday. Not because they lost but because they let me tobelieve that they could win and then didn’t. They mismanaged my expectations.

Don’t get me wrong I am a Packer fan. I will always be a Packer fan even though I’ve been to Arrowhead Stadium more times (2) than Lambeau Field (0). The Packers are the only football team I have truly followed. I even own a share! I grew up in New England was sort of a Patriots fan to the extent that I actually understood that football existed. I really discovered football when in college in Southern California, surrounded by people who supported the Los Angeles Raiders. So I did too for a time.  That was the year they beat the Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl – who knew they’d turn out to be the hometown team I didn’t support for 17 years!

But when I moved Wisconsin just before the dawn of the Mike Holmgren/Brett Favre era, I really understood what being a fan was. Like moving to Kansas City and discovering the love the city has for the Royals, being in Wisconsin and seeing how the fans reacted to the Packers something that was hard to ignore. That said, they could put something in the water Wisconsin to make everyone a Packer fan but that’s never been proven. 🙂 I know that for the 5 years I lived there I enjoyed being part of the family. My kids were both born in Wisconsin and even if they don’t both love cheese, they were raised with the Packers.

And so for nearly 20 years I’ve been the distant Packer fan. Cheering from northern Virginia when they won (and lost) Superbowls. Only getting to see them play in person when a generous friend with Redskins season tickets “couldn’t make” a game against the Packers at FedEx Field. (I will be forever grateful Bill). What really hurts about this loss is not the fact that they lost: they were supposed to lose. We knew it would be a tough game in Seattle, against a tough run team with a QB that was not 100%. We were 7 1/2 point under dogs so losing by “only” 6 points should feel better than it does. And it would if we had fought hard for those points and come from behind but couldn’t quite get there. But that was my expectation that wasn’t met or managed. What hurts is it is that they played the first 30 minutes ignoring what was supposed to happen and gave us all hope that they were actually going to win. Third-quarter was a bit dicey but still it was theirs to pull out. They made us believe they were gonna beat the odds. They were going to bankrupt the bookies. They were going to be the amazing underdogs. So my expectations changed from hoping that we wouldn’t be too badly embarrassed to thinking that I would could host a Packer Super Bowl party.

And somehow everything went wrong. It was like they gave up. The amazing comeback win belong to the Seahawks. They deserve it; they played harder in the last 15 minutes than the Packers played the whole rest of the game. If we have been the come-from-behind team even if the final score was the same  my attitude would be different but we had the game and we gave it away. Expectations were mismanaged and now I feel the cruelest of all emotions: disappointment.

We used to joke that was the worst thing you could say to a Catholic kid was not that you were angry at them but that you were “disappointed”. It implies that something wrong was substituted for something right. (Add a little Catholic guilt and you get well behaved children 😉 )

That’s how I feel about the loss. I thought it would be like when the Royals lost the World Series but that was different. The Royals weren’t supposed to even *be* there. They weren’t supposed to win any games.  They were ahead and behind and took it all the way to game seven. There’s no shame in losing when you’re not supposed to win. That’s how yesterday should have gone but there was no up and down, no back and forth. It was all Packers for most of the game to the point where I felt sorry for the Seattle fans. Then the pain was ours because they gave us hope and then didn’t deliver. I wonder if the Colts fans feel a different pain. They were also the underdogs and battled like them. But they most likely met expectations so maybe the sting is less.

So now the Donald  Driver jersey is hung up for another year. Aaron Rodgers is all over the news quipping “This one is going to hurt for a while”.  Yup, it’s the pain of mismanaged expectations.

</waxing>