This pretty much sums up my time as a lions fan
Another link supplied by starman91 thanks
For those who can’t open it here’s the beginning. It’s very long
DETROIT — For decades piled upon decades they have dwelled in a desolate vein of fandom unique in its hopelessness and hope while the nation around them has noticed this by barely even noticing. Seldom if ever has such devotion gone so unrewarded and unacknowledged. They’re the truest fans in America by playoff arithmetic, and they seem sorely in need of an ode while loath to crave one.
They’re those fans of the Detroit Lions who never have yielded to an obstinate gloom of scoreboards, whose sustained fervency counts as a marvel, if not a primer on the human condition, and whose downtown passion might startle an outsider.
On Thanksgiving morning, amid the tailgate hubbub and the sunny cold just before the very good Lions of 2023 (then 8-2, now 9-4) would lose unexpectedly and yet totally expectedly to the Green Bay Packers (then 4-6), one 74-year-old man stood on a sidewalk. Donald Harper’s Lions days began when Dick “Night Train” Lane visited his fifth-grade class.
“Ah, it’s been miserable,” Harper said later by phone about his 64 years of Lions fandom, but then, of course, it has been also far more intricate than that.
He has watched since ninth grade among a caring crowd at the home of his second family, the Beauchamps, whose adored patriarch, David, died in May at 73. His chair is left purposely empty for the gatherings this season. “Every time we jump up with excitement, we’re like, ‘Is there a flag?’ ” Jaber said. “Seriously.” He reels back through an old scar, the famed Calvin Johnson catch ruled a non-catch in 2010 against the Chicago Bears, then continues: “I can’t tell you how many times that we just, we go bonkers, and: ‘Is there a flag? Is there a flag?’ And someone will joke around, ‘Flag!’ And they’re just like messing with you. It’s such a trigger. It such a huge trigger. Huuuuge trigger. … You’re scared to get too excited because you’ve been punched in the face so many times.”
Other fan bases feel that, but life has shepherded Lions fans to a rarer precinct: misery as almost part of anatomy.
“I cannot wait for that moment [of a Super Bowl berth]. It’s going to be the best moment ever; I’m going to be jumping on rooftops. But it’ll be hard for it to ever feel the same,” Jaber said. “It’ll change everything. I feel like of course I’m going to be the same die-hard Lions fan, but it’s like — it’s almost like the yearning will be gone, and maybe we’re attached to the yearning. … I would trade it for it for sure, but at the same time, it would change things for sure.”
“You have that anxiety within you,” said Katrina Jeffreys, a Lansing resident and Lions fan since fourth grade in the 1970s, “and you’re not sure how you’re going to feel when you wake up the next day after [a championship] happens. We’re so used to having [the yearning] there, we don’t know how to act. There’s that part of it: ‘What do we do now?’ ”