My friend Lou wrote on my wall the other day, about this upcoming game, "Is this like an existential crisis for you?"
Kind of. I mean, not really. Maybe a little? Ok, here's the deal.
I grew up on Steve Young and Joe Montana and 49er football parties with my parents' friends. I went to Jerry Rice's last 49er game before he became an Oakland Raider. I knew nothing about any of the players, the coaches, or the statistics but the Niners were just in my life and I knew to root for them.
Fast forward to college. The Niners suck. Everybody has forgotten about them, at least outside of the loyalty of the Bay Area. I'm a young, naive college student in Burlington, Vermont where the pressing question of the season is always Giants fan or Patriots fan? Yankees or Red Sox? The New England vs. New York rivalry is something I would come to be very familiar with. My freshman year was when the Yankees played the Red Sox in the playoffs and again, tensions were high (to my old Wills dorm co-residents: excuse the pun). I rooted for the Yankees. Not because I knew anything about them but because I had been dreaming of moving to New York ever since I was a little girl. I was just a fan of New York in general. That is the honest-to-god only reason I chose to root for Derek Jeter and little did I know, I had picked one side of a rivalry that I would never be able to look back on. And who knows, Nick might never have started dating me if I had chosen to root for the Red Sox. You laugh now but I'm pretty serious. Nick is a born-and-raised, die-hard New York fan whether we're talking about the money-sucking, all-dominant, nobody-will-ever-win-as-many-championships Yankees or the struggling, embarrassing underdogs known as the Knickerbockers (when Nick was little, his dad used to tell people they spelled his name with "K."). As this sports-obsessed man would slowly infiltrate my life with sports (when we finally moved in together, my ability to avoid it was completely over), I became a fan in my own right.
I will never know about these New York teams as much as Nick, or watch them as passionately as he does, but I am still cheering for these teams alongside him. New York is my home now and I know more about Eli Manning and Amaré Stoudemire and Curtis Granderson than I know about anybody else on any San Francisco team (I do love that Brian Wilson though. Mmmm). But seriously, I didn't even know Alex Smith's name until that game last weekend against the Saints (which by the way, was one of the best football games I've seen in years).
So, it's pretty clear who I'm rooting for. Especially because my stepdad texted me the other night placing a bet against Nick and I: If the Giants win tonight, John owes us a decked out, labor-induced dinner with wine and appetizers and clean-up too. If the Niners win, we owe him.
So, let's go, Giants.
That said, the Niners hold a little place in my heart thanks to nostalgia and hometown pride. The red and gold logos invoke memories of driving past Candlestick Park, asking my parents' friends who they were "voting" for when they came over to watch games, listening to my dad screaming at the TV and spilling beer in the process.
Don't get me wrong - I will be pissed if the Giants lose. But if the Niners win, I will feel, at the very least, a smidgeon of pride for everyone back home and will probably wish I could partake in the joy and festivities that I used to know as a child for Niners success.
May the best team win.
