The Minnesota Vikings: My Experience

Another Year of Vikings football, another year of a laying a very stinky and very rotten egg in the playoffs. This year was supposed to be different. We told ourselves that Sam Darnold had miraculously zapped away all of the ghosts that had haunted him years prior, that coach O’Connell was in his third year as a signal caller for our offense, his play design would surely be more rich and faceted to contend with the exotic defense looks that plagued our team in the past. TJ Hockenson returned from the feast halls of Valhalla to plug the leak that was our third down passing game. We told ourselves this, and gave ourselves another dose of faith in the Vikings, a faith that has repeatedly failed us in the past.

I feel like it’s part of what you signed up for, being a Vikings fan. You follow a franchise that has been home to rosters seemingly devoid of foreboding cracks and holes, where they smack around teams left and right, showing off how they can win football games in all phases during the regular season. They always tend to give you a false sense of security, providing you an excessive amount of dopamine for much of the fall, come winter time the veil harshly falls. The drug dealers supply is suddenly spoiled, clients in shock with a now deeply seated pain from being let down.

Unfortunately for many, myself included, you aren’t given the option to become a Vikings fan or not. There is no paper and pen set down before you in an empty room relying solely on your conscientious decision to pick a side. The majority of fans are born into their contracts, proxy of their loving parents who I would deem innocent in the passing down of sports team devotion. See, most of the passing of the torch, or should I say “spreading” of the torch, is a symptom of echolalia, which is just a fancy greek term for monkey see monkey do. If I grow up all my childhood life watching my Dad in a purple Brett Favre jersey painfully screaming “NOOOOO” at the television screen every Sunday around January, chances are I will follow in his footsteps. Now, I am eternally grateful to share the enjoyment of supporting an NFL team with my father, but I am also somewhat unfortunate that the team happens to be the one with the most playoff losses in the history of the sport.

I knew the road would be long when Blair Walsh lined up to kick that field goal in the 2016 NFC wild card game. This was the first time I remember putting my whole entire faith into the Bridgewater led team, a 12-5 roster that exhibited many less than desirable characteristics. If I was the fan I am today, I wouldn’t have believed as hard as I did that frigid afternoon all those years ago. It’s funny, I speak of this like it’s a terrible life-changing event that I can hardly bear putting worthy thought to. In some ways maybe it is? I mean, this is objectively in the top 5 worst Vikings heart breaks, the ones above it thank god I wasn’t around for.

When the kick sailed wide left, I remember seeing the crowd behind the field goal net all collectively throw their hands in the air and back down again as they saw what happened. Every fan in that stadium felt the same emotion, a sickening disappointment, and that sorrowing feeling gradually made its way into my mind as the shock wore off. This was my first experience with a shattering of the faith, and my middle school aged mind wouldn’t dare venture into the idea that it could get any worse….

Welp here we are folks at the end of another Vikings season, and I can confidently say that it can indeed be much worse. Fashionably, 2016, 2008, and 1998 take the trophy for playoff losses, but this loss and the one two years prior just burn so badly for some odd reason. The loss in 2023 was unexplainable to me, we lost to Daniel Jones in our own stadium, and that man is a glorified backup at this point in his career (our backup). The defense that year….wasn’t great. Watching any game from that season made me question if 12 fence posts could do any better defending an offense. Well than I should be glad that our defense this season was top 10 in most categories defensively, and was awarded three defensive positions in the pro bowl. I should be happy right?

This is about the time where I would sit the other person down on a chair across from me on the porch and start telling them about the irremovable curse that befolds the Minnesota Vikings. No matter what improvements we make to the roster, no matter how good the circumstances seem to fall in our laps, we always seem to fold under the bright lights. The person then asks “so why stick with the team, why go through so much pain?” Well I can only categorize it as a kind of blind, selfish faith, that maybe one day this team may don some purple sun visors and waltz their way past the stage lights and into the material paradise we have yet to experience: Super Bowl Valhalla.