Once upon a time, in a once proud industrial city long since fallen on hard times, there lived a boy who loved sports almost as much as he loved chemically induced altered mental states. Like any sports fan, he had his team loyalties. In professional football, his team was the Dallas Cowboys. this was in spite the fact that the blue-collar city of his childhood was more than 1,600 miles from Dallas, a city he had never even visited in a state he had never been to. What motivated this boy to choose those Cowboys as his team is anybody's guess, but there's no doubt that their success in those days certainly didn't hurt. On Sundays, this boy would cheer his heart out for Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett and Too Tall Jones, even Danny White. He shambled through the halls of his high school rocking a Mr. Don haircut and a Dallas Cowboys Starter jacket (which might explain why his basketball teammates never invited him to the barber shop). He reveled in the triumphs of Troy Aikman and Emmet Smith and laughed in the face of his own brother, a fan of the rival Redskins.
A few years pass and the boy of our story is no longer a boy, he's grown into some sort of manchild of adult age. Over the years, he's left behind a lot of his childhood things: that tough luck town, Mr. Don, athleticism, his dignity and most importantly for our story, he's left behind those Dallas Cowboys. You see, something happened on February 3, 2002 that made our somewhat addled protaganist switch his loyalties from those 'Boys of the Texas plains to the New England Patriots, a team whose fans this boy mocked and ridiculed in the days when his beloved Cowboys were running rougshod through the NFL while men in Massachusetts wearing red pants struggled mightily in the hopes of making the playoffs as a wild card.
Some would say our formerly Cowboy-loving friend is a fairweather fan of the worst kind. The DomeSite would say he's a fayerweather fan for certain. However you look at it, you have to admire someone who's not afraid to answer the question "who are you rooting for" with the question "who's winning". Or do you?
