Sigh.

Being a fan of Minnesota sports has proven to be a tortured experience. Extended championship droughts, excruciating losses at inopportune times, blown leads – I have lived through them all, more than most sports fans should have to experience in a lifetime. I am only 32 years old.

Dealing with such heartbreak as a fan can make one fatalistic. Part of fandom is a sense of eternal optimism, the notion that your team always has a chance to win, even when “on paper” the team is athletically and statistically over-matched. Not believing that your team has a legitimate chance of success or victory makes you feel inadequate, as though you are nothing more than a fair-weather fan. However, when the end result of a season is always a loss, or a place finish below first, you come to expect such endings. In a way, this is more realism than fatalism, since the reality for fans of these teams is always failure, to one degree or another.

This explains the fatalism of Minnesota sports fans. We expect the Vikings to not win the Super Bowl, and we expect their last loss to be a pull-your-heart-out late-minute stumble. We expect the Gopher football team to surrender leads of 10- or 20-plus points in the second half. We expect the Timberwolves and Lynx to lose – not suddenly or cataclysmically – just plain ol’ lose. We expect these outcomes because this is almost all we Minnesota sports fans have seen.

Therefore, my expectations for the coming football seasons of my favorite teams do not involve a championship. You could say I have already given up, waved the white flag. Well, almost. We cannot totally surrender a season in advance, lest the miracle that was bestowed in 2004 on perhaps the most “cursed” team of our modern times, the Boston Red Sox, is laid upon us Minnesota fans. If that miracle can happen to the Sox, it can happen to the Vikings. No, really!

The Brewers have been in existence nearly as long (41 years) as the Vikings (49 years). Yet, for the most part, I do not see the same fatalism and angst from Brewer fans, even though the Brewers have the second-longest drought among all baseball teams who have never won a World Series. Perhaps this is due to the difference in Upper Midwestern passion for baseball and football. Perhaps this is from the smaller Brewer fan base. Perhaps this is from the lack of heartbreaking losses that Brewer fans have experienced.

Whatever the reasons, Minnesota fans like me, plus long-suffering Brewer fans, can at least be thankful we are not from a fandom even more deserving of sympathy than ours: Cleveland sports fans. The pro sports teams of Cleveland have not won a championship since the Browns’ NFL title in 1964 – two seasons before the “modern” era of the Super Bowl. On top of their 46-year drought, the city has had to endure stomach-punch losses by the Browns (The Drive and The Byner Fumble in the mid-80s), the abandonment of the Cavaliers by LeBron James (and the loss of his ex-team’s best chance at a championship), and the postseason futility of the Indians, including a World Series Game 7 they gave away in the bottom of the 9th to an expansion team from Florida.

We Wisconsin and Minnesota fans look at that track record and realize our collective situation is not so bad. Wisconsin fans have Packer Super Bowl wins, and even a Bucks title in the early 70s. Minnesota fans have the Twins’ wins in 1987 and 1991. Our college hockey teams have won it all in the last decade. For that matter, the Twins pushed back against my fatalism the other night with an extra inning win following a late blown lead that I assumed would lead to a loss (and what happens when you assume?).

Life as a Minnesota sports fan will, barring a sea change in the rate of success, likely remain difficult. I occasionally envy the Wisconsin sports fan, though I should know better. Relatively speaking, I’m doing fine. As the Red Sox showed, hope is always present. Even for the Vikings. A bit.