Let's go. . ..wait, what's the team again?

I keep having the same, very confusing conversation with people. It usually begins something like this:

Them: Hey, your team did really well today!
Me: My. . .. team?

Now, between April and October, I know who my teams are and what they're up to. But it's January. Spring Training hasn't started. Neither the Cardinals or the Diamondbacks have made any noteworthy acquisitions, and the Nationals seem to be stumbling along their usual path of weird mistakes like not spending any money and keeping Manny Acta around (I mean honestly, the man must have pictures of one of the Lerners fellating a goat).

So my next guess is that the person is assuming--wrongly, I might add--that I have some particular allegiance to the athletic teams from one of the Universities I've been affiliated with. And I peer at them skeptically with my head tilted to one side.

Them: Your team? Arizona?

Ah. Of course. My alma mater, the Harvard of the Southwest. But it seems too late for football--which is never very good anyway--and too early for basketball. So I ask them "which team?"

Them: The football team?
Me: The university?
Them: The professional football team?
Me: (blank stare)
Them: The Arizona Cardinals?????
Me: Yeah, that's real funny. What did they do, remember which end of the field their goal is for once?
Them: They're in the playoffs. And they're winning.
Me: Oh, come on. Who are you trying to kid? I know I don't follow football, but I wasn't born yesterday.

As the weeks go by, though, I'm beginning to think there may be some truth to these allegations. It was easy to dismiss it when it was just the occasional item on the radio saying that the Cardinals had made the playoffs--clearly they must have the wrong team. They probably meant the St. Louis Rams, and just got confused by the whole team name/former city thing.

But then I saw a few newspaper pieces that seemed to indicate they'd won their first playoff game in my father's lifetime. Which seemed like it could be accurate. First playoff game ever would've seemed more plausible, but I could make myself believe that they might have been kind of okay 60+ years ago if I had to.

And then I flipped the channel on Saturday evening, and saw a team wearing uniforms that looked familiar, and by all reports beating the other team by what at that time looked to be a score of 30-7.

First I called my eye doctor and my therapist and booked appointments, because clearly I was going blind and/or mad. Then I called my BF, who still lives in Arizona.

"Are the Cardinals in the playoffs, and winning?" I asked her.

"Oh, you heard about that?" she asked. She knows that I seldom hear news about Arizona, since I live in DC, and even less often hear news about football, since I lack some crucial part of my brain that allows me to process information about football.

"I assumed our broadcasters were misinformed," I said.

"Nope," she replied. "People are acting like it's the end of days."

I rolled my eyes. "Are they acting like they care all of the sudden, like they did with the Diamondbacks in 2001?"

"Yeah. The town is covered with red and white crap, and people are suddenly buying the merchandise that's sat unloved on the shelves for 21 years."

I was unsurprised. If there's one thing that Arizonans are good at, it's being fairweather fans of the worst sort. When the teams are doing well, people paint their garages in team colors, and rearrange the decorative gravel in their front yards into the logos. When teams are doing poorly--especially when they're doing poorly for twenty years or so at a stretch--we get named the second worst fans in the league.

Both of these things happening in a four month period? Not a surprise. Not a surprise at all.

You can't blame Arizonans for being fair weather fans. For one thing, fair weather is really all most of us can deal with--this is why we live in Arizona and complain bitterly about the cold when we're forced to be someplace else.

For another thing, most Arizonans are from someplace else to begin with. Most of the people I grew up with were first generation; even the one or two kids who were descendants of hardscrabble pioneering families were third generation, max. It's hard to really get into rooting for your "home team" when someplace else is your (or at least your family's) real home.

And the same, frankly, can be said of our teams. Until 1988, the only professional sports team in Arizona was the Phoenix Suns (this is why Suns fans are almost the exception to the fairweather rule. There are some diehard Suns fans. There are exponentially more of them in years when they're doing well, though). Getting behind a new team is hard; getting behind a relocated team can be even harder. You can't help feeling like on some level, they still belong to their old city. You wonder whether their fans are angry at them for leaving, or couldn't wait to see the last of them.

And just psychologically, it's tough to be sitting in the desert and find yourself suddenly trying to root for a team from a place like St. Louis or Winnipeg, a cold place with snow and a sense of tradition and a team history. Arizona has none of those things (frankly, we may not even have a map that shows where Winnipeg is).

All this is to say: I don't feel like the Cardinals are "my" team. Not just because I don't live in Arizona anymore, or because I don't know much of anything about football (I'm vaguely aware that there's an "AFC" and an "NFC," and that the winners of each "C" meet in the Super Bowl, which has excellent commercials). And not just because maybe three people in the entire state ever considered them "their" team up until a month ago.

It's mostly because I don't want to be one of those people--one of those assholes who sticks a team flag on his antenna with the price sticker still attached, or buys a used jersey from '98 off of e-bay and insists that she's always supported the team.

Will I root for them--at least, as much as I ever root for any team--if they make the Super Bowl? Probably (though if they're playing against the Steelers, they may lose out due to my weird enthusiasm for Steely McBeam). I'll dig out a red sweater and wear my Cardinals cap.

My St. Louis Cardinals cap. Because at the end of the day, people, that is my team. And the pitchers and catchers report in about a month.