What Is This Strange Emotion?

Indeed.

My mood swings over the course of this season have been like that of a pregnant woman. I said it would be like this in the season preview and I was right. It has been ridiculous. One week I am blathering on about hope and the next week I am beating the war drums again and warning people to stay away from werewolves.

This week, I find myself at the hope end of the spectrum. This is especially odd considering that a week ago I found myself covered in war paint, speaking in tongues and ranting and raving about how none of you should judge me for being a dickhead. But fuck all that weird noise, that was before I watched Matthew Stafford throw his fifth touchdown of the game with no time left on the clock and a shoulder that had been made into ground hamburger.

There are very few moments over the course of my fandom that I can instantly recall with a smile. Most of these moments - hell, almost all of them - involve Barry Sanders. Most of my other memories are terrible and have Yakety Sax playing in the background. It is an absurd world, and it makes me both laugh and cry. Many of those unfortunate moments involve Lions quarterbacks.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, one of those happy sunshine moments was made by a quarterback. It has been a long, long, LONG time since there have been any at all, and when it arrived and when it was over, it was like an ugly gray film had been lifted away and everything exploded into color for the first time. Oh Lord, I can see again. The colors, they are so bright and beautiful.

That is a bunch of weird gibberish, but that is what joy does to a man, it makes him spout stupid and vaguely embarrassing bullshit that makes little sense to anyone with a functioning brain stem, but again, fuck all that. I am happy and I will revel like an idiot.

Matthew Stafford planted his flag in the ground and screamed I'M HERE MOTHERFUCKERS for all the world to hear yesterday. It was a defining moment in his career and for the Detroit Lions. That may be ridiculous hyperbole. So be it. I don't really care. I have descended into disgusting sentimentality here. I realize that, but sometimes you just want to act the fool because moments like that are so fun, so enjoyable, that they make you remember why it's awesome to be a sports fan in the first place.

I pumped my fist like a jackass when Stafford threw that final touchdown and I rambled like a lunatic to anyone who would listen about how awesome it was. I scoured all the other Lions blogs for reactions, and for the first time that I can really remember, I just wanted to soak it all in. I wanted to remember how I felt in that moment for as long as I could. It was ridiculous and it was awesome and it was embarrassing and it was painfully naive and earnest and dumb and it was great.


This season is a strange one, and it has toyed with my fan emotions in weird and ridiculous ways. That is because we are lost in that hazy world between the horrors of the past and the promise of the future. We can see what will be, but we still feel what has been. It is a strange place to be, and it will cause ridiculous overreactions to both the good and to the bad. I recognize, and not to a small degree, that this whole post is emblematic of that. Something good happened, and I am grabbing it like a greedy Gollumsesque crackhead and running with it to a safe place where I can hold it and cradle it like my baby.

Okay, that is kind of disturbing, but what the hell, I am in a strange place and I cannot help it. I am not used to being this happy when it comes to the Lions. This whole thing felt different. I'll echo a sentiment by my man Ty over at The Lions in Winter. The win over the Redskins felt like the end of the Millen era, the final step on a brutal death march that claimed thousands of lives and left countless others insane and gibbering at the sun and the moon. But this win over the Browns felt like the beginning of something, like we had finally taken our first steps into a valley of the sun, where everything is happy and warm and there are candy and blowjobs for everyone.

Okay, okay, again, this is all vaguely ridiculous and hyperbolic. I mean, it was only the Browns for fuck's sake, and our defense looked like dogshit, we couldn't really run the ball and Matthew the Great still made some horrible decisions - particularly that throw into triple coverage which resulted in an interception late in the fourth that appeared to have doomed us. But fuck all that, cautious cynicism is for the cowardly and the insipid and I hope they all choke on their own black hearts.

Okay, wow. That kind of came out of nowhere, and I am raving and carrying on like a fool. I'm fairly certain the dudes with the butterfly nets are going to come calling any time now, but fuck it, these are strange times and we are living in a strange world, and these things happen.

Moments like these tend to reveal my embarrassingly sentimental side, and I would apologize for it all, but I am a complex beast and I must acknowledge that it is there if I am to have any joy as a sports fan. I mean, I can't always wallow in the muck. Sometimes, I have to smile and hang out with my happy sunshine friends and celebrate. These moments come along so rarely for me as a Lions fan that they are like Halley's Comet. All I can do is just stop and look at them with awe and wonder in my heart because they will probably be gone soon and then it will just be back to business as usual. But for now anyway, that fucker is still exploding across the sky, and it is marvelous and when I think of the Detroit Lions for the next couple of days, I will smile and I will remember that moment when Matthew Stafford made me happy as a Lions fan for the first time in a very, very long time.

I could - and I probably should - apologize for this post. It is rambling, dumb, sentimental, ridiculous, and for the most part pretty cringe worthy. It is also a portrait of a sports fan in the bubble of irrational exuberance. Soon, I will be torn out of that bubble and brought back to reality, but for now, here I am, and fuck it, I'm happy.