Like many other “fandoms”, being a fan of an NFL team has its ups and downs. And whether you like the NFL or hate it, or really have no opinion one way or the other, it’s a huge part of American sports.

I first got into watching football when I was just a small kid. Oddly enough, it wasn’t my dad who had an interest in it, it was my mom. For me, I’ve always just loved the sport of football and the athleticism involved. I was a very athletic kid (even from an early age), but of course was barred from playing anything other than flag football (actually, I excelled at what the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer).

Both sides of my family hail from the Pittsburg, PA area so I like to say that the Steelers are my “ancestral team”. They’ve got a great fandom, they’re (usually) a winning team, so it’s hard to go wrong there. But, I was born in sunny San Diego and at about the age of 7, I had decided that I should root for my home team. My mom actually went down that path too. It was the 80’s and the Steelers seemed to always be winning and my mom got a little board with it, believe it or not. So, she switched teams and then we both became Chargers fans. The Chargers in the 80’s were fun. It was the “Air Coryell” era, where Coach Don Coryell developed a new style of vertical offense that always saw some electrifying long passes.

I know there are some fans of a few select teams out there (Bills, Lions, Vikings and Browns fans, where you at??) who could relate to heartbreak when it comes to your team losing. But if there’s a weird NFL record for the way a game has been lost, odds are the Chargers are gonna hold that record. There’s also an oddball division that happened with Chargers fans when the team left San Diego for Los Angeles. There’s the “salties” (the San Diegans who are still salty over the move and refuse to root for them any more) and the “diehards” (like me, who don’t care where they are, they’ll always be our team).

The diehard Charger fans have been through it, let me tell you. Every season it seemed to start out good, we had great players, and then something bad would happen. Something would happen so often that the term, “chargering” became a thing. People have theorized that the team was literally cursed. This past year was so bad, that the team fired the coach and general manager after a historic (I’m not lying about achieving all the wrong records with this team!) loss to the Raiders.

The funny thing is, Mario was never a “sports guy”. He’d sit there with me watching a game while I’d yell at the TV screen, but didn’t seem too into it. I’d have to explain to him what was going on as well as the rules more than once. When we moved up to Oregon though, that oddly changed. There is no professional NFL team here in Oregon, so it’s pretty much all about college football and the Oregon Ducks (and to a lesser extent, the Beavers). Around about 2011, Mario became a Duck fan. I couldn’t believe it at first because, like I said, I’d never known him to really show an interest in sports at all, let alone football. He got a kick out of me being a fan, but that was about it. Eventually, he even went to a Ducks game. He never did fully explain what made him change his mind and become a fan of football. I remember in 2018 watching a few Ducks games with him on TV (another funny thing, I’m not as interested in college ball until you talk about the draft) and thinking that their QB was pretty good.

As luck would have it, the Chargers did bad enough in 2019 to land themselves the 6th overall draft pick in 2020 and that Duck QB would go on to be Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2020. I think half of Oregon became Chargers fans in that year and I think that was the first year that Mario came along for the ride as well and truly became a Chargers fan.

All of the Chargers fans began to have a little bit of hope that Justin Herbert was the superstar the team needed to break “the curse”. But like I said, we’ve been through it … we’ve now additionally suffered through 3 seasons of bad coaching, more heartbreaking losses (including a playoff game that still gives some fans PTSD) and horrible player injuries (including Herbert playing through cracked rib cartilage and a broken finger) which kind of culminated in that 63-21 victory ass kicking from the Raiders. The icing on the cake this season is that we all had to watch the Chiefs play, and win, another super bowl (yes, the Chiefs are damn good, but anyone who isn’t a Chiefs fan can not get excited about them taking home back-to-back Lombardi trophies).

Little did we all know at the time of that ridiculous loss to the Raiders though, that it would open the door for the owners of the Chargers to do what all of us fans think is finally, “the right thing” and hire a proven, experienced winner of a coach with Jim Harbaugh (who just came off winning college football’s biggest prize with his Michigan Wolverines). They finally broke that cycle of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The staff they’ve been building around Harbaugh so far in this offseason makes a lot of us fans feel like we’ve somehow stepped into an alternate reality, it’s that good. I offhand said that this is like winning the Super Bowl of Coach hires. We’ve had this superstar QB since 2020 and have not been able to out-coach opponents and win tough games. I think that’s about to change. In Coach Harbaugh’s introductory presser (a very rainy day in Southern California), the team owner told the story of talking to him on the phone: “I said you’re bringing the storm with you, it’s supposed to rain all day Thursday. There was a brief pause and he replied, ‘Dean, we are the storm.'”

So needless to say I’m excited. Bolt Up! As us Chargers fans say. I wish Mario were here to actually see this.