Close Game. Closer Family.

For most of my childhood, football wasn’t a thing. Not really. And to be fair, I didn’t find any sport to be all that interesting. Up to the age of 14, I was an only child. If anything, my father and I bonded over music and nostalgia. He was a busy man and I was a pretty independent kid. He wrote songs on a keyboard and I wrote stories on a typewriter.

But at some point in 1989, we sat down and started watching a few NFL games after church on Sunday afternoons. My dad said he was a Washington Redskins fan, but I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Being a novice of the sport, my only metric for liking or disliking a team was whether they looked like they were having fun, whether they laughed on the sidelines and made each other smile. At the time, we were a transient family, entering our last couple of years in Iowa, so I had no allegiance to any particular home team. But I remember the gold helmets and the white jerseys, the wide smile of Joe Montana, and the magic hands of Jerry Rice. By the end of that season, when I was barely 13, my dad and I sat down to watch my first Super Bowl in 1990, where the San Francisco 49ers laid waste to the Denver Broncos, 55-10. As luck would have it, we moved to Salem, Oregon in ’92 and I briefly went to college in Redding, CA in ’96.

Understandably, I got hooked on the west coast dynasty.

Fast forward to 2020 and that team, my team, is back in it again for the seventh time, in Miami, about three hours from our house in Central Florida. And I’ll be honest… I toiled for a month about buying tickets. I started playing chicken with buyer sites, waiting out the lowest price drop. I even contemplated driving down, at the very least, and being in the company of other Niner fans near the stadium, finding a way to check off that rare, bucket list experience.

And then I stopped looking at prices. It’s been nearly 20 years since my dad and I watched a Super Bowl together and 30 years since our first. So I bought plane tickets instead of game tickets. Decided to go watch the game with my dad, from a living room about an hour outside of Philly.

Like I said at the start, I’ve always been nostalgic. But this is what losing feels like.