The Detroit Lions: A Life, So Far

December 28, 1997

It’s probably cold outside. The Detroit Lions are in the playoffs for the first time that I can remember. To be fair, I’m four, so it’s not like I remember much. I’m watching the game and keeping score on a big green chalkboard in my family’s kitchen.

The game doesn’t go very well. The Arizona Cardinals are beating us pretty badly, and they build a 20-0 lead in the third quarter. I’m oddly in awe of the symmetry of the numerals, thinking that 20 is such a nice number—a portent of the obsessive-compulsive disorder I would be diagnosed with exactly 20 years later. Despite the cleanness of the deficit, it’s too much for my Lions, despite Barry Sanders‘ best efforts, and they lose 20-10. A loss, but nice and neat-looking loss, at least.

As it turns out, I remember even less than I think I do. A few years ago, I found a box score for the game and discovered that although I remembered the score correctly, it was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers we had lost to, not the Cardinals. The numbers were still pretty, though.

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Two years later, my mom told me Barry Sanders retired. I cried upon hearing the news. Then again, I cried a lot as a kid, mostly at my Lions, who refused to be good despite drafting Michigan State running back Sedrick Irvin, who I was convinced would be Sanders’ heir apparent.

Despite my best efforts, I’m an ENFJ, and I feel every feeling I have with terrific intensity, and that intensity did not lend itself to measured and well-considered responses to the relative unimportance of football games when I was a child.

August 9, 2007

It’s actually August 10th by this point. The Detroit Lions had already played their preseason opener on the 9th. I was on vacation with my family at my grandparents’ house on Lake Michigan that week, but, unfortunately for me, the game was not televised live on local TV. It might have been because the local FOX affiliate was across the lake in Wisconsin or something, I don’t remember. The important thing was, this was a problem.

I was planning on listening to the game on the radio, but when I discovered that NFL Network—a new and mysteriously beautiful cable channel—would be airing a rebroadcast of the game in the wee hours of the next morning and that my grandparents *got* NFL Network at the house, I determined to wake up very early and watch the game then. My family was fine with this as long as I kept the volume muted. So, after insisting on no spoilers—which my family obliged me—I went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep due to my excitement over a re-broadcast of a preseason game, so I ended up staying awake in my bedroom all night watching my favorite movie, Remember the Titans.

Finally, kickoff time rolled around, and I crept down to the living room to watch the game. Keep in mind; I thought this game was a big deal. At the time, I thought the preseason was supposed to be competitive, so I was approaching this event as though the Detroit Lions needed to defeat the Cincinnati Bengals in this football game.

The network’s bottom-screen ticker spoiled the result for me in the first quarter, but I kept watching the game as though it were the Super Bowl. When the Lions hit a field goal in the final moments to win the game, 27-26, I celebrated by myself in the dark living room illuminated by the silent bubble television screen. It was a uniquely alone moment, but I felt a deep connection. I’m pretty sure that right then I was the only person in the world celebrating the Lions winning that already-finished preseason game in the dark of the early morning, but in my head, I was celebrating a win with my team.

November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving Day. The 0-11 Lions are taking on the 10-1 Tennessee Titans. I have been lauding this game as an opportunity for “the upset of the century.” As far as I can tell, a winless NFL team has never beaten one with only one loss this late in the season. I even wrote an exhaustive guide to the game, complete with positional breakdowns, explaining exactly how the Lions could not only contain, but defeat the vaunted Titans, who were led by quarterback Kerry Collins and defensive linemen Albert Haynesworth and Kyle Vanden Bosch.

The Lions were down 35-3 in the second quarter. Some of my relatives, who were there because it was Thanksgiving, were teasing me and I was not handling it well. I retreated to a bedroom in my grandparents’ house and resolved that I was done with this team, that I would never be a Lions fan again.

My mom found me, gently sobbing and generally feeling embarrassed. She told me I couldn’t give up, that because I had made a commitment to this team, that I needed to stick it out, in both good times and bad. Granted, with the Lions it had always been bad, but she told me that wasn’t an excuse. If I was going to commit to something, I had to see it through. Sometimes, she told me, that means finding the little good things and celebrating them. Sometimes you lose and lose badly, but you need to find the good you can when things are going poorly.

I dried my eyes, gave her a hug, and went back to the game. Daunte Culpepper had thrown a touchdown to Michael Gaines to cut the lead to 35-10 at halftime. I never cried about the Lions again, even though they ended up going 0-16 that season.

That offseason, the Detroit Lions will draft Matthew Stafford with the first overall pick, and next season—with the game blacked out on local TV—I will listen to the radio broadcast of Stafford leading the Lions to that come-from-behind win over the Cleveland Browns.

December 3, 2015

I’m an adult now, in college. The Detroit Lions are doing better these days, having made the playoffs the year before, but they’ve had a rough season. After the Lions started 1-7, including losing the infamous “bat game” in Seattle on Monday Night Football, general manager Martin Mayhew and offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi were fired. The players rallied around Jim Caldwell, and he was kept on, and quarterbacks coach Jim Bob Cooter was promoted to offensive coordinator. Overnight, the team improved, rattling off three straight wins including a huge win at Lambeau Field, their first in my lifetime.

The Packers came to Detroit for a Thursday night game. I went to the local Applebee’s for half-off apps with my friends. We would often do this for Lions night games. That night the Lions played fantastically. They jumped out to a 17-0 lead in the first quarter and were the better team throughout the game. Still, they let the Packers hang around, and in the final seconds, the Packers were down 23-21, 61 yards from the endzone.

After the game ended, it didn’t feel like the game was over. It never really registered that the game was really over and that the Detroit Lions had really lost. It felt like there should have been more time left. I had been so sure we were about to win. Very in-character for us, to make Aaron Rodgers look good like that. The replay makes some fans upset. It just makes me smile a little bit.

September 8, 2019

I’m 26. I’m going over to my best friend’s house to watch games on the first Sunday of the season. To be honest, I’m more concerned today about how my daily fantasy lineups will do than whether or not the Lions will win. When you start writing about football, as I did shortly after I graduated from college three years ago, it’s hard to maintain the kind of enthusiastic fandom—and, frankly, bias—for your team that you were once famous for.

It’s been a long three years. My body is scarred from surgeries and procedures because of a chronic disease I was suddenly diagnosed with during my senior year, one that still causes me considerable pain, despite treatment. My mom has finally obtained a divorce from my absent father, but during that process, she watched both of her parents pass away, the ones who had the house on the lake and hosted Thanksgiving. I’ll be a pallbearer at my grandma’s funeral on Tuesday. My mental health requires weekly visits with my therapist, who tells me I’m doing very well, considering.

My friend and I watch the early slate, the local FOX broadcast on one screen and a Redzone stream—pirated because we’re poor—on a second. The first games play out, my friend and I cracking jokes and rooting for the players that we collaborated to select for our fantasy lineups earlier in the weekend, half-heartedly hoping they will make us a little less poor.

The Detroit Lions are on during the 4:00 slot because they’re playing out west today, and they jump out to an early lead. I tune out the game for the most part; I feel confident that they’re going to close out the game against the rookie-led Cardinals (it actually is the Cardinals his time, I checked) and I’ve got a couple of guys I’m watching in the other games. One by one, the other games end and the Lions game is the only one left on, my team-leading 24-9 in the fourth quarter.

I don’t need to tell you what happens next. You saw the game, too. When Kyler Murray drove down the field in the final minute of the fourth quarter, my best friend and I both knew what would happen for the same reason you did: it’s the Lions.

When overtime does happen, however, I expect the Detroit Lions to do what they have done my whole life: find the most disastrous and cataclysmic way to disappoint me. This time, though, they don’t. They don’t even reach the closure of defeat, instead, the final result is one of mere ambivalence: a tie, the first one I ever remember in my life as a fan.

It’s not the kind of result that elicits the once-ubiquitous tears of defeat. Not that I would have cried if they had lost: I’m a grown-up now, and there are better things to cry about. Now I’m just numb.

When I was younger, I was oddly proud of being a Detroit Lions fan, despite the constant losing. There was a kind of saccharine sadism to my relationship with the team; on some level, I got the benefits of martyrdom without the dying part. When I got older, and football fell down my list of Important Things, being a Lions fan became more of a punchline. The team was bad, and given their reputation for finding the most bizarre ways to *be bad,* they were at least morbidly entertaining. Eventually, though, they started winning, and that was fun.

I thought I didn’t really care much about this team anymore, that my childlike obsession had been overwhelmed by the blinding concerns of adulthood. As it turns out, I do still care. I can’t not care. Our stories, mine, and the team’s, are inextricably woven together.

I’ve already written at length about what the Lions gave up is recent years and how what they have now wasn’t worth it. I’m not going to rehash that here. But I will say this: there have been very few constants in my life. That’s just how life works. Things come and go. But despite the transient nature of things, the Detroit Lions have always been there, a mainstay, an anchor, Sundays at 1:00. Even in near-weekly defeat, just *having the team* meant something, but this team doesn’t feel like mine.

I watch them, but I don’t recognize them. It’s like seeing an old acquaintance and remarking “you’ve changed,” but not in a good way. They’re still your friend, but you just don’t connect with them anymore.

I used to connect with them, feel like I was a part of them. But now the whole franchise feels manufactured, reduced to useless platitudes and copycat antics. The joy and magic of that 2016 season and all those comebacks is gone. The sheer glee that surrounded that haphazard misfit defense that somehow managed to be great in 2014, the electricity of the greatness of Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson and even the vaguely-endearing bumbling of the winless 2008 squad is just not there. The Lions have been a central part of my life for over two decades, but today they feel like strangers.

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I want my old friend back.

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