The Vikings tricked us… AGAIN
Joe Johnson
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The Vikings tricked us… AGAIN
I got engaged last Christmas to my best friend. She is the best person I’ve ever met, with one initial glaring flaw. She was a Packers fan. Out of love, though, she decided to eschew the Packers and jump head/heart first into being a Minnesota Vikings fan.
Multiple times since she’s looked at me and asked “How/Why do you do this?”
That’s a question I always wished I could answer, and I think I’ve stumbled onto it FINALLY after years of suffering.
The reason we all love the Vikings so much is because they are REALLY good at roping us into believing in them, typically in incredibly exciting and endorphin producing fashion.
Case in point, the formerly 4-5 Vikings. After we all wrote the team off, they won three in a row (all against divisional foes) and got all of us to believe that they were on the precipice of something special.
The NFC doesn’t have a clear front-runner, and after watching this rag-tag defense stymy great quarterbacks like Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford and even 2017 nightmare creator Nick Foles, we all thought that the Vikings were essentially 7-5 (considering what we thought was the “soft part of their schedule” starting with the lowly Dallas Cowboys) and playoff bound.
That was then.
Now? It’s more of the same. The fan-base is cannibalizing itself to find who is to blame, the endorphins have turned into a serotonin deficiency, and we’re all essentially where we end up EVERY year… Wondering why we do this at all.
Sure, the season isn’t over, the Vikings could win out and do something special, etc. But as I always say to people who comment on my (non-Cousins) articles/podcasts that I’m too negative… If you’re negative about the Vikings, you’re batting 1.00 since 1961.
There is a lot to feel good about with this team, sure, and what they did with a bunch of rookies and practice squad guys WAS admirable, but we should’ve seen this coming.
It feels good when they win and when we all collectively get caught up in those feelings. We all want to believe, because mathematically you’d have to think that it’s only a matter of time until this curse is broken. You’d think.
But these are the Vikings and they were only a few weeks removed from being dominated by the winless Atlanta Falcons. The margin of error was too tight, and as we all saw even during their win-streak, this team makes too many mistakes.
The worst part of all of this is that the Vikings essentially won those divisional games at the detriment of their own future. Meaning, they won just enough to ruin their draft position next season and won’t win enough to make the playoffs.
So, we can’t even get a losing season right.
You’d think we’d be used to this by now, but it doesn’t work that way. My Dad, the reason I’m this insane over a football team, used to tell me that as I got older the losses wouldn’t effect me as much. I’d always argue that I thought it would get worse, because these things pile up emotionally.
I was right.
I am going to make sure that the next time this team gets my hopes up, which shouldn’t be long (as that’s the other way they get us), I will take a deep breath and remind myself that these are the Minnesota Vikings and, again, betting on the most negative possible outcome has been a 100% winner since just after the Korean War.