I became a Packers fan when moving to New York

I became a Packers fan when I was eight years old, living in New York. Probably not where you’d expect this story to start.

My dad worked for IBM, and when we moved, they put us in corporate housing while we looked for a home. We were there for about three months. And for the first time in my life, we had cable.

That meant ESPN. That meant NFL Films. And that meant discovering the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.

I watched stories about Bart Starr, the history of the Packers, and this place called Green Bay where football seemed to mean something different. The cold, the stadium, the people, the pride. I fell in love with the whole thing. Honestly, I got a little obsessed.

The more football I watched, the deeper that connection became. Looking back, I think some of it had to do with how much we moved when I was a kid. I never really had one place I could point to and say, “That’s where I’m from.” But I had the Packers. They gave me a connection to a place long before I ever lived there.

I used to tell my friends that someday I was going to move to Green Bay and marry a girl from Wisconsin.

Well, I married a girl from Wisconsin. My friends had a pretty good laugh when that part came true.

We didn’t end up in Green Bay, but we do live in Wisconsin. And these days, when someone asks where I’m from, Wisconsin is what I tell them.

Funny how that started with three months of cable TV in New York.