Rooting for the Ravens, Reluctantly

It’s that time of year again when the Baltimore Ravens become a major topic of conversation around town, and once again my family is left out of the loop, and willfully so, because we are not Ravens fans.

There, I said it, probably one of the biggest taboo confessions you can make in this town. While I personally feel a twinge of lost camaraderie over not being a part of what everyone else is so excited about, the guilt I feel over not being a Ravens fan is for my children. Soon, when everyone else will be sporting their purple jerseys on Fridays in celebration of the weekend’s upcoming game, my kids will be left out and it will be all our fault.

The familial dislike for the Ravens has its roots in Cleveland, where my husband was born and raised until moving here in the 1980s. As such, his side of the family always rooted for the Browns, and of course there is bad blood after the whole thing where Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore and the team became the Ravens. I grew up in Western New York, where I watched my father, a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan, holler profanities at the TV screen every Sunday during every winter of my life because that poor team was either always coming so close to winning it all or was hopelessly losing from the first kickoff of the season.

Add that to the fact that the Ravens really came into their own at a time when my husband and I were actively following season after season of a limping Baltimore Orioles franchise. At the time, we were disgruntled at the fair-weather nature of Baltimore sports fans, where there was no support for a flagging but iconic baseball team yet everyone was suddenly jumping on the Ravens bandwagon just as the team started to win.

So you see it’s pride that keeps us from following the Ravens. But I’ve lived here for 13 years now and while I feel like an official member of the community having been here so long, I have to admit that there is a part of me that secretly wants to seal the deal by following the local football team this year. It’s corny, but I wish I could feel a bit of that team spirit, or if nothing else to understand what everyone else is talking about. More than anything, I don’t want my kids to miss out on that feeling of belonging. This is their hometown, after all, and who am I to deny them their birthright Baltimore team? Perhaps there are Ravens jerseys in their sizes in their future.