Told ya so

All I need to know in sports I learned from Monopoly. My family has an old, beat-up version of NFL Monopoly from 1998, and that timeless board game has guided me through more sports conversations than I can count.
Go ahead, ask me about the 1998 NFL season. I can tell you that the Colts were the worst team and that the Broncos won the Super Bowl that year. In fact, I can name all 32 teams in order of how they finished. And because Monopoly was my favorite board game when I was young, I can even tell you how much each team sells for on the board. What I can’t do, however, is go beyond that.
Since the sports fan side of me is perpetually stuck at 7 years old, I’m a little bit lost in sports conversations these days. I memorize stats and match players to teams, but the next thing you know, Kyle Korver leaves for Chicago and I’m stuck with a useless—but impressive—fact about his 3-point percentage.
Since I started working at a newspaper, this debacle has changed slightly. It’s my job to read every story—sports included—so I pick up on a few more things. I can fake my way through a conversation on just about any U sport, and I know enough to know when to steer the conversation back to 1998 football.
Occasionally, someone will get suspicious about my shallow knowledge of sports and ask me to name a player from the 1998 season. This always makes me nervous because I can hardly name anyone from the current season. As a general rule, if a player’s name isn’t in The Chronicle, I don’t know it. (Case in point: My brother once challenged me to name a single hockey player, and in my struggle to come up with “Wayne Gretsky,” I said “Walter Gronowsky.”)
Name confusion aside, I do actually enjoy sports. I’m halfway decent at tossing around the ol’ pigskin, and I love the atmosphere of arenas. I ran cross-country and track in high school and can hold my own at soccer. But making the transition to an actual sports fan would require so much more.
First off, I’d have to learn the terminology. Parity, in the paint, Hail Mary, libero—who has time for a whole new vocabulary set?
Even if I mastered that, I’d have to declare undying allegiance to a few teams from every sport. That would require knowing everything about that team, and I still think the Packers’ team color is blue because of its placement on the Monopoly board. To make the commitment of true fan, I’d have to rearrange my entire mental image of football, and that’s just not something I’m willing to do. The Packers are blue because they are the team next to the Broncos, and that’s not going to change.
Sure, the Steelers have a good quarterback and wide receiver, but you can’t defy fate. This Sunday, one team will become the victor destined for Monopoly greatness, and we all know it will be the team in blue.