Detroit Lions have signed a new QB

The NFC Championship game was attended by thet  Detroit Lions. Only once before, in 1992, has this assertion been made. The Lions were mired in mediocrity from 1991 until 2023. Star running back Barry Sanders, the greatest player in the franchise’s brief history, retired at the top of his game. The Lions made NFL history in 2008 when they lost every game in a single season for the first time. Star wide receiver Calvin Johnson announced his retirement from football seven years later, citing a lack of enthusiasm for the game.

I have been a devoted Lions fan for 19 years. I had never watched them win a playoff game before last month. Still, I never quit watching—neither did a lot of other Lions fans. It seems incomprehensible: How could a team be so bad and still have such a dedicated following, willing to forgo job, education, and the chilly Detroit weather in order to watch their favorite team play? Why is it that millions of people worldwide and countless Americans spend a few hours every fall Sunday watching mature men attempt to murder one another? It turns out, for those who are willing to put in the effort, there are a lot of advantages to being a sports fan.

If a person’s enthusiasm for a sports team is just based on that team’s performance, Lions supporters would have vanished thirty years ago. However, their continued loyalty suggests that the fandom’s dedication is motivated by something deeper. I believe that hope is a major factor.

Like many other Lions supporters, I took solace in the moments leading up to kickoff. Right now, before a goal was scored by either club, there were countless ways this game could go. Both sides were playing on an even playing field, regardless of what analysts and pundits thought. I continued to watch the Lions despite their terrible performance, not because I expected them to win but rather because I hoped they would.

This kind of hope provides a compelling case for sports viewing. By serving as a constant reminder that there is light at the end of the tunnel, hope can help us escape despair. Hope heightens the experience when, after decades of failure, your chosen team finally turns things around.

A community can be revitalized by that same hope. Enormous with their team’s recent accomplishments, Lions supporters flocked to San Francisco for the NFC Championship game. Prior to that, supporters endured the bitter cold to witness the Lions triumph over the Rams. These fans were there from the start; they didn’t just appear out of nowhere when the Lions began to win. Consider Milan, Michigan native Ben Broumand, 33, who has never missed a home game.

In your opinion, what’s the point of being a fan amid difficult times? stated Broumand during a Detroit Free Press interview. As a lifetime supporter, you always expect that the team would perform well, which is why this is so meaningful. I take it you’ve always had that hope? However, it’s significantly better when it does happen at last.

But being an ardent sports fan is about more than just wishful thinking. After all, it’s usually not sustainable to hope for something on your own. The sense of community that underpins both Lions fans and America’s greater sports fixation is strong because fans of the team feel much more a part of the community than they do of an individual. The Lions seemed to be carrying the weight of the entire city of Detroit on their shoulders throughout their playoff games. Individual cheers inside Ford Field blended into a unified chorus with a single goal in sight: triumph. This sense of unity is more than just symbolic; Detroit’s small business community has been rejuvenated by the Lions’ recent successes.

This hypothesis of communal solidarity is well supported by psychological research. Psychologists are aware that individuals who are separated into groups unintentionally think and act differently toward others who they identify with on a psychological level. Sports fans can easily and arbitrarily divide into groups depending on their geographic locations.

Fans of Germany and Greece engaged in physical altercations during a soccer match, citing economic strain stemming from Germany’s debt bailouts of Greece. “You wouldn’t be here without Angie,” the German supporters jeered. “We’ll never reimburse you,” the Greeks retorted. Even while it occasionally compromises the values of fair competition, collective solidarity nevertheless makes common people feel that they are a part of something far bigger than themselves.

An even more intriguing theory is supported by some psychological data. The spectating brain is also a playing brain, according to researchers at the University of Parma in Italy, who observed monkey neurons firing while they watched a human researcher consume peanuts. When a monkey watches someone else do an activity, some of the same motor neurons that fire when the monkey performs the action also fired. We refer to this group of neurons as “mirror neurons” because we can comprehend the observed action, its objective, and the feelings connected to it when they fire. Mirror neurons can even cause a slight but detectable increase in our heart and breathing rate when we are observing intense activity.

Such a discovery adds to the evidence supporting the global passion for sports. A part of our brain pretends that we are doing the same thing when we see our favorite basketball players jump for a dunk or our preferred soccer club score a penalty kick. The idea that our minds may trick us into thinking we are doing physically impossible things is a little romantic. It gives us the impression that we have a lot more in common with our sports idols than we actually do. Observing sports not only fosters a feeling of unity among fans and the community, but also with the sportsmen who serve as role models and bring generations together.

Take Larry Benjamin, a lifetime Lions fan who is presently receiving hospice care at his Saginaw home. Benjamin, along with Lions receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown, dyed his hair blue in an attempt to change things. Benjamin’s photo started making the rounds on the internet, and soon the front office and players for the Lions noticed. Benjamin was deeply touched by the phone call and signed jersey that St. Brown sent him.

Benjamin’s unexpected experience encapsulates the ability of sports to uplift and give us hope that the seemingly mundane events in our life can have spectacular consequences. Being a sports enthusiast has brought Benjamin peace on some of his toughest days.

Most of us can’t throw a football as perfectly as Jared Goff, run 40 yards in 4.4 seconds, or catch touchdown passes with one hand. But everyone yearns to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Even though reality tells us differently, we all want to think we can achieve these kinds of accomplishments. What inspires us to believe is the power of sports.