There are too many to list here which is, I suppose, the point, though most of you are achingly familiar with the topic: The Detroit Lions‘ most notorious losses.
Sunday’s history-making loss to the Baltimore Ravens was merely the latest. I’d argue it was the most improbable, too, but then there will be plenty of time to quibble. For if you know anything as a Lions fan — other than what pure yet fully unrequited love feels like — you know Sunday’s crushing blow won’t be the last.
What is different this time is that the pain of Lions’ fandom might finally gain traction outside of Michigan. Any good therapist will tell you that denial is an impediment to progress. And that you can’t be heard if you can’t be seen first.
For years —decades even — those that highlight and measure the misery of any given fanbase have focused on teams that have lost when the stakes were highest. Buffalo and its four Super Bowl defeats come to mind. Or Cleveland’s playoff losses to Denver in the 1980s, so romanticized and engrained in the NFL consciousness that they became known as “The Drive” and “The Fumble.”
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Atlanta drew pity a few years ago when it blew a 28-3 lead in the second half of the Super Bowl. And Minnesota — at least for those over 50 — garnered sympathy when they kept losing big games in the 70s, then lost in the NFC title game in the 1998 season on a field goal after going 15-1 behind the most electrifying offense the league had seen to that point.
Sunday’s loss to the Ravens began to change this, as one commentator after another tossed pity to the Lions watching Justin Tucker’s 66-yard field goal hit the goal post, then bounce up and into the netting as time expired.
On Monday, Bill Simmons, who hosts a podcast on his website, “The Ringer,” discussed in detail with his co-host that it might be time to acknowledge the torture here.
The problem, he said, is that the Lions hadn’t had enough high-profile losses. He’s probably right, though around here it’s hard to forget the Lions getting Brett Favre’d during the 1994 playoffs, or getting jobbed by the officials against the Cowboys in the 2014 playoffs.
Both were wild-card losses. Perhaps not high stakes enough for the football viewing public outside the Mitten State.
But Sunday?
Well, it didn’t need to be. The history-making field goal was enough to memorialize the gut-punch moment. So what that is was only the third week of the season? The loss spurred not just pity, but actual empathy.
That counts for something, right?
If nothing else, if the rest of the country is beginning to acknowledge the misery, it makes it sting less here. Again, this is therapy 101.
I actually heard non-Michiganders talk about Calvin Johnson’s “complete the process” loss to Chicago, and Aaron Rodgers’ primetime Hail Mary, and Marty Mornhinweg’s decision to give up the ball and take the wind in overtime.
Either someone had done research, or the jolt of Tucker’s gravity-defying dagger loosened the NFL’s cognoscenti’s collective memory. Either way, you should take it. Let the therapy wash over you. Enjoy — if you can — the national “there, there.”
It’s only been six decades in the making.
I’ve always felt that part of what makes loving the Lions uniquely soul-sucking is that the pain has largely been hidden from view. There are no books celebrating the myriad and torturous ways to lose.
(Who else loses when a last-second, go-ahead touchdown is negated because the receiver’s knee touched the ground, and the review forced officials to run off the final eight seconds of game clock?)
There are no documentaries, no “30-for-30” specials about blown hands-to-the-face calls (remember Trey Flowers at Green Bay?) or overlooked delay-of-game penalties that allow kickers to make record-setting field goals.
That just happened, of course, and, by now, it’s foolhardy to think that anyone who loves the Lions didn’t feel in their bones that the only truth to come out of the missed delay-of-game would be an apology from the NFL …
… long after it mattered.
I’m guessing you can wait for the melancholy tomes romanticizing all the losing, and you don’t mind if it takes another decade before someone, somewhere, splices together the Lions’ greatest foibles — complete with interview snippets of a graying Barry Sanders — if the reaction to the latest, “Lions-esque loss” is proof that the national narrative might mercifully be changing.
The Buffalo Bills got a documentary because their kicker missed a field goal in the Super Bowl and their coach could lecture about American history. Well, that and they kept losing on the same stage.
Yeah, I’ll admit that’s interesting. But so is the annual, psychic beatdown that takes place every fall if you favor Honolulu blue.
It’s congenital around here at this point: You’re born into the infinite morass.
Perhaps that’s why Lions owner, Sheila Ford Hamp, turned to Calvin Johnson as she absorbed all those boos during halftime Sunday and said, “It’s all right.”
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She knows. What it means to love this team. The price you pay for that love.
To her credit, she didn’t flinch. Instead, she stood there and waited for all those years and decades of pain and frustration to wash over her, acting as a kind of misery repository, at peace with the barrage of venting.
In that way, she was part therapist, too. And while it surely pains her that her team was the object of pity around the country this last week, she understands what it must mean.
Finally, you are seen.
Finally, you are heard.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.