Nick,

First off, Aaron Rodgers is fucking great. I have a friend who has “Aaron Rodgers shaped cheese” in her fridge, which seems weird but completely appropriat

But the bandwagon question is a good one. Is it fair to the diehard fans if I root for a team only when it succeeds? Isn’t part of loyalty being dedicated through good seasons and bad?

A friend I grew up with, Conor, always gave me a hard time for being a bandwagon Red Sox fan. And he wasn’t wrong. I only watched the Sox seriously once they made it into the playoffs; Conor caught as many games as he could, starting with preseason. But let me tell you: that’s a lot of fucking games, especially for a sport where the early season matters very little. I just can’t commit to that much baseball.

Naturally, a lot of folks in Boston take the Red Sox too seriously. Or at least I think so. While I was studying abroad, I took a couple weeks to travel around Western Europe with my friend Joe, who was notorious for claiming that the only thing he cared about more than “pussy” was the Red Sox (his words!). The Sox were in the World Series while we were wandering around Florence, and all Joe could talk about was how he was having regrets about studying abroad in Europe when he could’ve been watching the Red Sox.

We couldn’t find a place to watch any of the games, but even if we had, we would just be watching alone. This sort of gets back to my original point. I like sports because I like the excuse to yell, to be passionate about something that carries very little weight in my life. That’s probably why I’m a bandwagon sports fan — who wants to cheer for a team when no one is cheering?

Maybe I’m missing something though. Is it more satisfying to follow a team through their entire season and see them take home a championship? More importantly, is that experience worth it?