Well, Here We Are

If you would have told Lions fans that going into the last weekend of the season they would be approaching the game like it was the Super Bowl they would have been ecstatic. After all, that must mean there is something still left to play for, right? Well. . .

It's been a long season. A long tiresome season, and now here we are at the end, facing down the worst thing a team can possibly face. 0-16. It is almost inconceivable. No team has ever gotten this close to those infamous numbers and no group of fans has been in this place before. It has been a long season, but it has been an even longer decade, and really, for most of us, it has been a longer lifetime. Being a Lions fans comes with no rewards, just the distinct and all too familiar stink of failure. When I first started rooting for the Lions as a little kid, they were bad. And not much has changed. Sure, there was the brief 90's oasis when Barry Sanders carried them to the cusp of respectability, but even then there was an ominous air of certain disaster which always hovered just on the periphery. We knew, even when things were going well that we were only moments away from it all falling apart. Watching playoff games knowing that in the end our Lions would stumble off the field, heads down while the other team celebrated, epitomized what it was like to root for those teams. They were okay, but they were never great. They were pretenders and we all knew it. We waited with clenched teeth for the bottom to drop out and when Barry Sanders tearfully walked away from the game, sick of the losing, sick of the never ending mediocrity, and when Matt Millen was given the keys to the kingdom, that bottom dropped and it dropped in ways we never thought imaginable.

This decade has been one of never ending misery. Every season begins and ends the same, with the knowledge that 4-12 is in the cards, 6-10 is a luxury and 7-9 is a miracle. And that miracle came last year, a 7-9 season that served as the high water mark for this atrocity of a franchise in this horrible decade. But even that high water mark was a disaster as the team went 1-7 down the stretch and sent themselves spiraling into this...this horrible thing.

We always hoped though. Every year, we always hoped that what we knew to be true could somehow be overcome, that this was the year that all that poison and all the misery would just disappear and we would watch our boys scamper towards the dream season that it seems like just about everyone else gets at least once. But it never comes. And now we find ourselves hoping against hope that we can get one lousy win. It is almost a perverse mockery of everything we have gone through as fans over the years. We have hoped and we have wondered what it would be like to finally break through, and we have done these things for so long only to find ourselves staring at something that has never happened before and now we have to hope one last time, not for glory or for that dream season but for one tiny scrap of dignity.

For us, the Super Bowl that we have always dreamed about is this Sunday. And that is the saddest and most damning thing I could possibly say to explain what it is like to be a Lions fan. There are no championships for us at the end of this long, dark road. There is no glory, no cheers, just a desperate hope that we can avoid the very bottom of a hole we have been falling down for fifty years. We always wondered where the bottom was, and well, here it is.

The game itself is not something any of us want to look at. The Lions haven't won at Lambeau since 1991. And it's December, which is just one more slap in the face to our crippled psyche. We are horrible against Green Bay on the road, and we are even worse when it's cold. Add in the memories of Aaron Rodgers abusing our defense earlier this season and the 48 points they put up on us at home and the outcome of Sunday's game couldn't be more clear.

There is no reasoned analysis to be had here, no ifs or maybes, just a desperate hope that we can somehow avoid the inevitable. We have hoped a lot over the years and we have never had that hope rewarded. But here we are again, hoping one last time against hope.