Detroit Lions: Desperate times call for desperate measures, ‘Dear Santa …’
By Robert Jones
As the Detroit Lions play a meaningless game against the Minnesota Vikings today, the real focus of this fan base is about making the right offseason moves.
The Detroit Lions are a Motor City tradition at the holidays. We all gather around to watch them play in their annual Thanksgiving Day match-up with hopes that they will find a way to save their season. Then at Christmas we start trying to decide who will be our surrogate team for the playoffs since the Lions won’t be participating.
In a way, being a Lions fan is like getting coal in your stocking 365 days a year.
Yet as the Lions current season of disappointment winds down, we do what we always have to do as a sort of self therapy; we look ahead to the draft and free agency with hope.
For cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Dallas and Green Bay, where their histories are steeped with winning tradition and the Vince Lombardi trophy, one would have to guess they just don’t really appreciate what a winning franchise means.
One might think they probably take it for granted.
Meanwhile here in Detroit we don’t even get the table scraps left behind by the championship teams. The Lions and their fans have to wait for the non-existent scraps left behind by the ‘wanna be’s.’
Last Christmas I received a book from my sister-in-law that was written by a longtime Chicago Cubs fan in the media and what it was like to be a Cubs fan. This provided a detailed history of the Cubs 108 year curse, which of course included his whole life, leading up to the summer of 2016 when the Cubs did the unthinkable and won the World Series.
On the journey to the ‘happy ending’, at one point he said that being a Cubs fan was like living a monastic life. Since winning was impossible, it meant that Cubs fans truly appreciated the game more than other fans and were above the emotional turmoil that all others lived lived with.
Since all Lions fans know and understand that feeling of hopelessness, we are capable of saying this; Losing sucks and while the Cubs drought before 2016 was longer than the Lions current disappointing streak, Cubs fans were every bit as desperate and emotionally twisted as Lions fans are right now.
Except their team was considered ‘lovable’. Ours is just considered a ‘loser’.