I tire of hostility toward our valiant green-clad brothers, they who have endured so much, that we might taste their small contribution to Patriots sovereignty lo these many years. Let them come close to the table of brotherhood, but not all the way to the table of brotherhood, and let them sit down at the kiddie-table of nephewhood, to break bread as we break wind, having eaten chili before their arrival. For they are number teeming dozens, each with their own dreams and hopes, some yet to be dashed, each with their own sorrows, each with the capacity for joy outside of football season. Is there any love as great as a JETE fan's, or as doomed, or as tragically misplaced? Children led by the hand to the fire station at age 5, told to ask for the fire chief and to hand him a hand-scrawled note, pity the JETE fan for the mistreatment and betrayal he has endured. Super-villains who fell into a vat of chemicals, leaving them hideous monsters who vow revenge on Bruce Wayne, merely witness the long lives lived in utter gloom by JETE fans from Coast to, well, River, and conclude that they really don't have a beef.
Remember New York -- or, for the majority of fans, have you seen old photos of New York -- not before the Twin Towers fell, but before they were built? That is the New York of the happy JETE Fan. It was the New York of super balls, one super bowl (not yet officially so-named,) young Paul Simon singing about walking over some gigantic bridge, and hot young numbers who are now, one by one, making their way to the nursing homes of the garden state. These were the last women of New York who felt their pulses quicken and various other responses to the thrill of temporarily significant JETE football. It was a New York in which The Fantasticks was only a little long in the tooth, at 9 years old, and Cats' decades-long reign of weird mediocrity still lay in the future--and a hot ticket might set you back $10. This is not to be confused with a hot ticket for a JETE game, except one category of "Super Bowl III" ticket, the yellow variety, which went for $12. White and Blue tickets--there were no green ones--sold for $6 and $8 respectively.
Cities without NFL teams have gained them, some of them ex nihilo, like Tampa, and those teams have risen to win multiple super bowls while the JETE presided over wasted season after wasted season. Generation of little New York lonely boys have been born, made imaginary friends, outworn their JETE fan gear, seen the various arrangement of logo elements become passe, come back in fashion, and disappear again, all while their beloved JETE found new, more foul ways to fail. Generations of USC quarterbacks have been thrown into the JETE QB mill only to come out misshapen and scarred for life, with a 1000-yard stare and a tendency to blurt out "they're coming. They're coming." Meanwhile their New York (oh fine, New Jersey) lonely boys grow up saying "I see dead cap."
And through all of this, our valiant green-blooded alien adopted but quickly disowned brother the JETE fan looks in on football season, his breath fogging with a green tint the window through which he watches the season unfold, past panes of glass still so solid to him, made of his own belief in his team's more or less eventual failure. He stares dumbly at the season like a fish with a transparent partition in the middle of the tank, trained that the glass hurts to bump into. Like the fish, he would stand back from that glass wall even were it removed, scarred by the memory of his own devotion to failure, cursing his team even if, by some miracle, it won something, knowing that any win would be flukey and fleeting. He can never, after all this heartache, plunge past that place the glass had been again... wandering like Fireman Ed back to the firehouse, searching for that fire chief who, his mother hopes, will read that handwritten note, not ask questions, and take pity.
But that's not the sad part.
The sad part is that @Jetsfan79 has been reading this, thinking "My God, he NAILED it," and has been trying to figure out how not to get razzed for asking if he can repost this on JETE boards.
Okay but THAT's not the sad part.
The sad part is that they'll actually like it and laugh at it.
And okay, it's a little sad that I ripped off the "New York lonely boy" thing from Girls5Eva.
