Living With The Enemy

I live a sad little piece of sports psychology. I am a Denver Broncos fan living in the heart of The Raider Nation. I work with some of them. I am friends with some of them. You can't walk out onto the sidewalk most mornings without tripping over some silver and black regalia. Don't get me wrong, these people are serious about their team. Many in ways that I can only imagine. Not just bumper stickers and T-shirts, but tattoos and children's names. "That's little Otto, and our youngest Biletnikoff."
And so, every year I play a quiet little game of schadenfreude. "The Raiders lost again? Oh that's terrible," I say as I secretly make another notch on the wall next to my bed. In recent years as the Broncos' fortunes have declined from their Super Bowl victories in the previous century, and a subsequent peak in the luck of the Oakland franchise, I have remained vigilant about one wish for the football season: That Denver should have to win just two games. The two against the Raiders.
You might think that this puts a lot of karmic weight on two weekends of the year, and you'd be right. I was pleased that our previous coach took special delight on beating the organization that fired him once upon a time, and he won twenty-one of those twenty-eight games. And that was fine with me. Still, every time the boys in Orange and Blue drop one to the Silver and Black, I have to walk out into that neighborhood. The one with the skulls and eye-patches, the "Commitment To Excellence" billboards, and little Casper over there.
The long and the short of it: Oakland 20 - Denver 19. It's going to be a long winter.