A Packer fan in Minnesota explains herself

It's the irrationality of the bliss that bothers Minnesotans the most. Nothing seems as ridiculous as a clutch of full-grown adults carrying on like every Sunday is Christmas morning and the Target toy aisle is about to explode in our living rooms. Minnesotans who might forgive the exuberance cannot forgive the cheese hat, the brats, the public intoxication and Brett Favre.

If I may: I prefer the OSHA-approved big G hardhat to the official slice of cheddar but the truth is, after a beer I'd proudly wear either. I don't really even need the beer. I'm from Wisconsin. This is who we are. And if we're going to be famous for cows, then so be it. Donning a Cheese Head doesn't say: I'm a hick. It says, rather subtly: I know you think of me as a hick, and I don't care what you think.

As for beer, I myself have been to numerous Packer games and have never publicly vomited, urinated, partaken in subzero nudity or otherwise made the evening news. But football is about spectacle, and it has a way of climbing into the stands. I got my first taste of it in the mid-'80s, when a meaner, drunker crowd could not be found than the one at Milwaukee County Stadium. During an awful Packer loss, a woman in her 70s stood up in the bleachers and called the team a name too vulgar to repeat here. And this was a home game. I was 10. It was wild, strange, dangerous, exhilarating. Miraculously, my father took me again and again, season after season.

And finally Brett Favre. Due to the relative ugliness of his departure I will merely say: Brett, I still love you. It's OK. You're a flawed but ultimately beautiful man. Now: on to Aaron Rodgers.

A friend once asked me why a bartender in Hudson, Wis., had a framed picture of Brett behind the bar. Well, because he's Brett. Because Brett Favre made us proud. And more than that, he made us right. After decades of being terrible, after decades of touting wins that happened before I was born, Packer fans were, either tenaciously or foolishly, still sitting in the abject cold. Brett Favre's picture is framed not because he won a Super Bowl (after Majkowski, who would fumble three steps into a seven-step-drop), but because he validated every game my grandmother watched through a haze of Winston smoke every fall Sunday of my life. He made being from Wisconsin special. He made us special.

My sister and I watched Aaron Rodgers win the big game in a sports bar in Buenos Aires. And before you lament that waste of time in such a beautiful city, may I say that more than one Argentine accent screamed "Go Packers"? Even if they were just copying us. Culture is where you find it.

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Sarah Lemanczyk, St. Paul, is a writer and independent radio producer. She teaches radio production at the University of Minnesota's Radio K.

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