DK Sweets wrote:Feel free to delete this if you feel like it strays into good fan/bad fan territory. I don't intend it that way, but I understand how it could be misunderstood. I just had to at least try and get this feeling out.
No problem and you walked the line just fine so there's no need to delete anything.
I truly don't understand why somebody would enjoy following a team closely and caring enough to continue posting if they were just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. That can't be fun, and I don't know why somebody would invest so heavily in a recreational activity that they didn't enjoy.
The joy of being a fan, to me, is the optimism. I remember the great wins more than the painful losses. I understand that there has been more pain than joy in recent years, but projecting past failures on the future just seems like a painful and meaningless experience to me. If we somehow pulled an amazing run to the Super Bowl, most of the greatest season of our lives would have been spent complaining. I just don't see how anybody could look back on that joyously.
I think sometimes we try to be TOO objective. We've been burned before and looked like a fool, so it's just easier to predict bad things and be content with being wrong if things go well.
I guess if I were to boil it down into one paragraph, it would go something like this: the Lombardi trophy is the ultimate goal of the team. As fans, that can't be what defines a good season to you. Even the Pittsburgh Steelers (with the most Super Bowl wins in league history) have only had 6 successful seasons if you have such a narrow view of success. I want to enjoy the players we have and hope they succeed, and in the process I want to focus on the great moments more than the disappointing ones.
This is a very complex thought for me to try to express, and I feel like I only scratched the surface with it. If anybody thinks that they feel the same way I do and thinks they could convey it better, feel free to share your perspective.
I hear you and I understand where you're coming from. Honestly, whether it always comes across that way or not, I try to take an "enjoy the ride" mentality most of the time when it comes to the Vikings. I certainly don't just wait around for the next bad thing to happen and, like you, I don't know why anyone would want to follow a team if that was their attitude. However, I do think there's a difference between just waiting around for those bad moments and growing somewhat accustomed to them (and frustrated by them). They have a cumulative effect and the longer someone is a fan, the more they experience them, the greater that effect. It's impact is inevitably going to vary from person to person but it has an impact.
Defining success purely in terms of Super Bowl wins and being unable to enjoy a season without that end result makes no sense to me. There's a LOT more to enjoy about football than that and even the heartbreak can ultimately be enjoyable in a bittersweet way. The end of the '98 season crushed me but I still relished that season and look back on it fondly because the rush of going 15-1, enjoying that ride and thinking they were going to win it all was awesome.
As a kid, throughout my '20s, I was endlessly optimistic about the Vikings. That continued into my 30s too but somewhere along the way, my view changed. As I became more and more interested in the nuances of the game, being optimistic alone wasn't the joy of being a fan for me but following the team's ups and downs became more enjoyable. Looking at the team objectively is part of the fun for me at this point (not that it's truly possible since our views of something like football are inevitably at least somewhat subjective). I don't pessimistically wait for the next bad thing to happen and I don't optimistically believe the future is always brighter. I follow the team and go along for the ride on which they take me. I think some other fans do likewise. On the surface, that might seem like the "We've been burned before so it's just easier to predict bad things and be content with being wrong if things go well. ..." mentality you referred to above but I assure you, it's quite different. I think just projecting bad things as a defense mechanism is inherently pessimistic, not objective but I'm well past the point where I enjoy being optimistic about the team purely for the sake of it. I follow them religiously, wear the colors, cheer for them to win every time they play but I try not to delude myself about them and I'm frustrated by their lack of success. It wears on me and yet I still get optimistic enough about them to get burned again. It just happened in 2013. Heck, it just happened last month, in the season opener and last week, when they lost a game I predicted they would win in overtime.
This IS a difficult subject to discuss and I've seen it come up again and again over the past decade. I think that's because the Vikings have been such a middle-of-the pack team for the majority of that time, rarely
really good and rarely
really bad. When a team spends so much time on the cusp of being a winner and on the cusp of being a loser, fans inevitably end up falling loosely into the states-of-mind we're discussing. The more optimistic believe the team is close and becoming a contender is just around the corner. The more pessimistic don't think it's going to happen and others just think the team is stuck in the middle. prolonged mediocrity breeds this kind of discontent in a fan base.
Projecting past failures onto the future may seem pointless but some trends (like the team's record at Soldier Field over the past 10-15 years, for example) are hard to ignore. Having been to almost every one of those Soldier Field games in person, I can tell you that I go into each one well aware of the Vikes problems winning in Chicago and I also go into each one hoping for a win. I retain that hope until the win is either in hand or clearly out of reach. I'm not sure if that's optimism, pessimism, objectivity or all 3. To me, it's just being a fan and for the most part, I think that's what everybody here is doing. We're just all different people, with different experiences, so we inevitably see the Vikes differently, especially when they aren't providing crystal clear indications that they're great or awful. If we were looking at a 4-0 team with several dominant wins I suspect the overall attitude here would be much more unified and much more optimistic. If the team had been blown out in 3 of 4 games and they were 0-4, I suspect even the most optimistic fans would be pretty down on them.
I hope some of that made sense and some of it is helpful. I'm speaking primarily of my own mindset but hopefully, it provides a little insight. Since I'm probably looking like a pessimist to many around here this week, maybe it will be useful.
You guys are seriously misreading me on this. I was making a lighthearted observation, not a harsh judgment, and everybody wants to argue about it. 
Now I expect all of you to write a paper about irony and turn it in by the end of the week. Everybody start with this definition:
