Get on with it, Burrowheads

All it means here today is everything

I remember it like it was yesterday’s nightmare. December 17, 2000. The Bengals were 14 games into yet another season of dirges. The Lost Decade (copyright 1995, me) of the ‘90s was so lost, it wandered into the next century. The 3-11 Bengals hosted the Jacksonville Jaguars that day. It was the tail end of the Scott Mitchell Era. Surely, you recall.

It was also 9 degrees at kickoff. The wind-chill was minus-20. It says so right there, on profootball-reference. com.

I couldn’t tell you one play from that contest. What I recall, clear as night sweats, was one dude in the upper deck at PBS, in the northeast corner of the stadium. A mile high, sitting by himself, in a nearly empty stadium.

I was in the press box with nothing much to do. The L Decade had bludgeoned me sufficiently that I was numb to any new atrocity the Bengals could place in my path. What could I write that I hadn’t written before? Groundhog Decade had jaw-jacked me so much, the best I could do was rope-a-dope. And believe me, there were more than enough dopes to go around.

Then I noticed the guy up in the northeast corner, his own personal Rorschach Test, a black parka-wearing ink blot, a testament to the insanity Bungles football had become. I had to go talk to the brudda, the way you might have to talk to the stubborn homeowner in the hurricane who sails out to sea on the remnants of his back deck.

It started snowing in updrafts by the time I reached him. Yakutsk was warmer that day than Section 1 Million, Row Infinity, Seat Invisible at PBS. If the Freezer Bowl had an evil twin, this was definitely it.

“What are you doing here?’’

I explained to him that I was being paid to be a participant in this insanity experiment. I told him I’d met a lot of fans over the years, and that he was unlike any of them. Please, sir, allow me into your thinking.

What the guy said next has stuck me for 23 years.

“I love football,’’ he said, “and I love the Bengals.’’

Why do we love them so?

Our sports teams exist to tease, taunt, deceive and conjure false hope. And that’s in the years when they’re not going 3-13 or losing 100 times. Our lives aren’t usually materially changed by their performances. The potholes don’t go away. The price of milk doesn’t care.

And yet. . .

Here we are.

I recall times during The Lost Decade when the Bengals existed to evoke misery. What I remember most about that time is, you still showed up. You still showed up.

These were your guys. They played for your hometown. Who said life was easy or fair? You make a commitment, you see it through. Since ‘68, the Bengals were family. You might have pondered a divorce, but you never went through with it.

Today is for you.

It’s for anybody who ever watched Dave Shula coach or Dave Klinger quarterback. It’s for the legions of you who simply hung on. It’s for that guy on Dec. 17, 2000. I hope he still has tickets.

If you could cut a cross-section of cortex from the brain of a sports fan, and replace the gray matter with live and in color snapshots, what would they look like?

What might yours look like?

Fists pounding on tabletops, in unison. A million-man chorus of shrugging shoulders. Heads wagging horizontally side to side, swaying in time with your words:

Just one before I die.

What else?

Throats savaged from cheers, palms blistered by high-fives. Livin’ the Who Dey Lifestyle is exuberance leavened by the dread of history. It is hearts that have gone 15 rounds and are ready for the 16th. We want that feeling. It tells us we’re alive.

Only sports evokes this sort of feeling. It’s why we build fantastic stadium palaces when all football really needs is 120 yards of dirt and grass and a couple goal posts. It’s why Joe Burrow will earn something approaching $50 million a year in his next contract. It’s why almost everyone’s memory bank holds a bat or a ball. Sports make us feel alive.

Is it worth it? PayJoe Stadium cost something close to $800 million. Can we put a price tag on the collective joy of an entire region? How do we quantify joy, anyway?

At 6:30 tonight — and maybe, two Sunday 6:30s from now — our little Republic will agree completely on something. Hearts and minds will bissect at a sweet spot in time. Not much else in joyful human experience can compete with that kind of civic mojo.

We’re not NY, LA or Chicago. The vastness of human experiences and diversities barely lay a glove on us. You’re either for us, or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, well, there’s the exit.

Our parochialism isn’t always a strength, but it surely plays well on days such as this. The big places are scattered in even the best of sports times. Don’t like the Yankees? The Mets are a couple subways down the track.

In the little burgs, sports are what bind. The little burgs are tight as a fist. Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kansas City. Cincinnati.

So good on ya, Cincinnati Bengals. Get on with it, Joe Burrow. Deliverance is at hand. For a day, anyway, all it means to us is everything.