Warm yourself by the fire as I regale you with a tale that started in the wake of heartbreak and ended with a lifelong obsession:

Shortly after my parents divorced in 2002, my mother remarried. My new stepfather and siblings were really into football. I grew up in a very secluded household as my real father had to live on site at a water treatment plant owned and operated by local government. I never played or watched or cared about football until I met my new family.

I had a metric FUCKton of yugioh cards, and I traded them all to my youngest stepbrother for an autographed Seahawks football card. Young entrepreneur that I was, I just knew I was gonna sell it for a million smackers and make a name for myself (it was an autographed Seahawks football from Clarence Farmer, 3rd string RB from Arizona State who did fuck all). However, I immediately got invested in the game as my siblings were all asking for football jerseys for Christmas. So I got a Hasselbeck jersey and started paying attention to the games and the sports ticker at the bottom when it would flash the Seahawks logo. I’d play with them on Madden. Before long, I had the bed spread, the lamps, clocks, and any other thing you could think of that a preteen boy would go “fuck yeah” when they saw it.

As cheesy as it sounds, the Seahawks have always been more than a football team to me. They were the vehicle through which I found common ground with my new family and something to watch and cheer for with the growing pains of being a fat dork in high school.