Football has never really been my thing. I tried for years to get into it, but it ended up taking a lot more than just football to make me a football fan. If you had asked me what I knew about football when I was about nine years old, I would have told you that some guy from the Chicago Bears visited my day camp once and picked me up and spun me around, but that was about it. Now I can tell you that that guy was Jim Harbaugh and that he was the starting quarterback on Da Bears when I met him.

As I got older, I did get slightly more football savvy. One of my closest guy friends in middle school had this Bears shirt he used to wear pretty often and every time he wore it, I asked him when he was giving it to me. It was one of those really great old, worn out grey tee shirts and it just looked so comfortable. Anyway, I never got the shirt, but it did tell me that the 1985 Bears won the Super Bowl, which I thought was pretty cool.

Then in high school, I finally learned the rules of the game. I worked as a parking lot attendant at Northwestern University’s Ryan Field. Once we were done, my fellow workers and I got to go into the games for free. For most sports fans, the opportunity to go to Big Ten football games for free is amazing. Did I go to a game? Well, of course. I went to the game when Northwestern played Duke. If you’re not laughing, there are two things you need to know: one, I’m a huge Duke basketball fan, and two, Duke football is AWFUL. Embarrassingly enough, that is the only football game (above the high school level) that I have ever attended. But it was beneficial experience for my football knowledge. One of the guys who worked with me sat there explaining every detail of every play of the game to me. I learned what things like “first and ten” meant and that a safety was worth two points.

Shortly thereafter, I actually learned how to play football. I played lacrosse in high school and when I was a junior, this senior football player, Wes, started running our conditioning sessions. One night, we got to practice at the time we thought we’d signed up for the gym, but it turned out we had it all wrong. So Wes decided to improvise. He brought his car near a field outside, turned on all of the lights, opened all of the doors, and gave all of the girls these little glow-stick bracelets (Don’t ask me why he had those in his car). He taught us how to throw and catch a football, split us up into teams, and showed us two of the best and most strenuous hours of our lives.

Okay, so there is something a little bit fun about football. I really don’t know why I never watched the games; it wouldn’t have hurt to support the Bears once or twice. They were actually not that awful…well at least not until I was actually old enough and had the attention span to sit through an entire game.

What I have found, though, is that someone can still be a football fan without being able to stay awake through a whole game. The biggest football fan I’ve ever known would have to be my sister’s boyfriend, Mike. Mike was staying with us over this past Winter Break, so I made it his mission to get me into football for real. He was actually doing an okay job, until I walked in at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the Colts-Broncos game and found him, along with my sister and my dad, dead asleep on the couches. As they slept, I realized I didn’t need anyone else to get me into football. I watched the whole quarter by myself and loved every second of it. And for no other reason than Peyton Manning.

I still don’t understand people who can watch entire football games for the sake of football. Loving football, for me, is about guys like Peyton. I still laugh and cheer “Cut that meat! Cut that meat!” with him every time that dumb Master Card commercial comes on.

Football players are just such characters, such personalities. I love that I saw Torry Holt and Rex Grossman on “Wheel of Fortune.” And that Donovan McNabb was crying into the microphone when he was interviewed after the game Sunday night. I love that Randy Moss pretended to moon the crowd and Rick Reilly made fun of his lack of creativity.

Football is just fun. It’s rough and aggressive and dirty and just wonderful. I regret not getting into it in the past, but I’m hooked now. And for those of you who aren’t (which is probably not many, considering the typical Sports section audience), it’s not too late. And it’s well worth it.

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