The Green Bay Packers and the Incredible Weight of the Last Decade
For more than 10 years Wisconsin sports have languished just shy of ultimate victory. This year could finally be different.
Time has taken on a profound new meaning in the pandemic, I think we would all agree. I’ve been pondering time quite a lot, its passage, how it trickles or how it rushes.
A decade is a long time. A decade is nearly half of the entire time that I’ve walked on this planet. Add a year to that decade to make it a nice ripe 11, and you have exactly half the time I’ve been strutting about.
It’s this odd, incongruent number I come to now as the Green Bay Packers ready themselves to face a formidable foe this coming Sunday afternoon. Eleven might not seem like much, but as it happens it is the exact amount of time between the present moment and the last time that the Packers triumphed in full Super Bowl glory. And the intervening years have been anything but kind.
Now, I know what you might say: “Every sports fandom thinks they are the most maligned! You’re nothing special!” But alas, I have incontrovertible proof to firmly cement not only the Packers but all of Wisconsin sports as burdened beyond belief.
The problem of the last decade for the three major league teams that call Wisconsin home (the Packers, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Milwaukee Bucks) is not performance. If you simply would like to see abject misery year in and out, you must look elsewhere. (I recommend a fascinating video by SBNation’s Jon Bois, who proves quite resoundingly that the lack of success encountered by the Cleveland Browns over the last two decades is nothing short of witchcraft.) No, there are no dregs in Wisconsin sports, only competitors. Yet, in its own way that almost makes the lack of success worse.
Since Aaron Rodgers and his Packers triumphed in that Super Bowl 11 years ago, he and his cohort have reappeared on the NFL’s second-biggest stage, the conference championship, four more times including this year’s upcoming game. The result from the forthcoming contest notwithstanding, the Packers have lost every single time, including a brutal 22–28 collapse six years ago against the dastardly Seattle…
