The Pittsburgh Steelers are playing the Green Bay Packers in the Superbowl. As something of a non-football-fan, those are my two favorite NFL teams. I like the Steelers because I’m from Pittsburgh, my Dad was a fan, and my mom grew to be a fan in her old age. My brother is a devoted Steelers fan in his own highly particular superstitious way (he even wrote an unpublished novel, “The Tenth Guy” about how what the watchers do affects the outcome of the game). Dave’s football rituals include vacuuming and laying out his terrible towel with our parents’ rings and watches on it. In fact his superstitions about football mirror many of my superstitions – like how you should never fly in an airplane without taking a library book along with you, because that means you’ll get home safely to return the book. Dave is on sabbatical in India, studying yoga and Indian flute, and riding a rented bike on the wrong side of the road, and managed to listen to the Steeler game on the radio.
I like the Packers because I’ve lived in Wisconsin now for longer than I lived in Pittsburgh – I left there when I was 22, and not counting four years in Chicago, I’ve been in Wisconsin ever since, and I’ll be 56 this year. And my older son is a big Packer fan, so I like the Packers because he does. At the last librarians’ conference, one of my colleagues, who is a very professional, upper level academic librarian, told me that her teenage son lets her sit next to him on the couch if football is on, and that’s in a nutshell how middle aged moms become football fans.
But most of all, I think this Superbowl is great for football fans. They get to look forward to a good game between two really good teams. I was listening to the commentary on Sunday and this morning, and everybody seems happy. As my younger son wisely put it, “Nobody hates the Steelers OR the Packers, except maybe a few Bears fans or Cincinnati Bengals fans.” Or, as I’d like to say, everybody just likes both teams.
