I like a lot of sports, but in particular I love soccer and football.
My two favorite football teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots, but I will cheer on just about any team because I love the game.
I grew up in Virginia, and people who know that are sometimes surprised by my choice of football teams. Often times, by way of explanation, I just give the short answer of, "I lived in Texas for a while, and my dad's from Massachusetts." Both those things are true, but that's not quite all there is to it.
Football, and those two teams, are connected to exactly one thing: Happier times.
I remember being the age my oldest daughter is now, watching football games in Allen, TX with my family. Football is the unifier in my young mind, the common denominator in a family where my older siblings and the younger were quite spread apart in age. I became a Cowboys fan in Texas, watching those games in which Aikman, Irvin, Sanders and Smith ruled the field.
And then, just a few short years later, everything fell apart. My parents split up, we moved away from Texas and for a long time, things weren't very happy for anyone.
But there was still football. There were games with my siblings, and neighborhood games that I wasn't often allowed to play in but would still watch. Backyard games and churchyard games. And there was still the Cowboys.
My parents divorce was not an amicable one, and I didn't see my dad for almost a decade. I became a Patriots fan because it was a way to hold on to something that connected me to him.
Football remained in my life, morphing in my teen years from a unifying force to an equalizing one. As a girl who struggled all her life with her self image and her self worth, playing football on Sundays brought a sense that I was just as good as anyone else, at least for a few hours.
Maybe it's silly to attach so much emotion and sentiment into something so trivial. After all, it is just a game.
Isn't it?
