My family have been Vikings season ticket holders since 1998.  When I first got my season tickets I was like a lot of Vikings fans who were in their late 20′s and early 30′s, I loved the Vikings and I believed in my heart that they would win every game.  My father-in-law on the other hand was the most cynical and apathetic Vikings fan on the face of the earth.  Don’t get me wrong, he loved the Vikings and luckily had instilled that love of football in his daughters.  My wife is an even bigger football fan than I am.  Vikings games to her family are like a religion (you know you hit the jackpot when your wife comes to you and says “don’t make any plans for Sunday because we are getting a bunch of beer and watching football all day”)  But I hated watching games with her dad because all he talked about was how they were going to find a way to lose.  I asked him one day why he was so cynical and why he even bothered to watch the games if he was going to be so negative all of the time.  He told me “when I was young like you I believed in the Vikings, I believed they would win and I would get mad and throw things at the TV just like you do, but after  watching them lose four super bowls I realized they are never going to win anything.  One day you will be my age and you will realize that no matter how good of a season they are having it will ultimately end in failure.  But year after year you will keep coming back.  The Vikings are like your kids, no matter how bad they screw up you still love them.  I promise you, one day you will be just like me- its just a matter of time.”  I told him that he was crazy and that I would never be like him.

So there I was, 17 years of disappointment later, sitting on my couch watching the Vikings playing the Seahawks this past January and watching Blair Walsh lining up for an easy chip shot field goal, telling my wife “I bet he misses this and we lose.”  Five seconds later I was turning off the TV wondering how I had managed to turn into my father-in-law and wondering why I even bother putting myself through this yearly abuse.  “I’m sick of this,” I told my wife, “we do this same thing year after year.  We waste our time watching this team knowing full well they are never going to win the Super Bowl.  I’m done, I’m never watching the Vikings again.”

Now here we are in the preseason and once again my wife and I can’t wait for football season to start even though we know it will end like it always does, with the Vikings failing to deliver the Super Bowl.  It is then that it hit me- football has an off season just so you can have time to forget about your disappointment and get excited all over again for the next season.  This is the same reason that God gave us summer.  Sure I’ve thought about how great it would have been to live in an ice age where you could ride all year round, but then I realized that if we could ride every day, we might actually get bored with it.  It would be like opening Christmas presents every day all year long, it loses its specialness.  Summer comes for us to enjoy golf, fishing, the beach, burgers on the grill and a cooler full of ice cold beer.  Then there are the days that you have to mow the lawn and when you are done you put that lawnmower away right next to the snowblower and your snowmobile as they wait there like silent sentries for their moment to be called into service.   One day soon you will wake up and there will be that cold tinge in the air and the smell of leaves getting ready to fall off their trees and you’ll pull the cover off of your sled and start getting it prepped for winter way too early.  October will come and you will look at the calendar and see the days rolling by getting you closer and closer to Halloween and, if you live in Northeast Minnesota, you know that Halloween is the magic date because once November hits you can start watching the weather every night for that early season snow, knowing that this might be the year when that Early November snow falls and stays on the ground until April (see 1991).  That is what summer is for, to rekindle that childhood excitement that you felt every fall and to get you to those nights in November and December when you flick on the floodlights and hope to see the air filled with white flakes from Heaven. God new what he was doing.  Now if He could just do something about the Vikings…