I’m getting devoured by the effing whatever God thought was fair to visit on the Gulf Coast. I am not about to speak that bug’s name, lest another one find its way to the thigh I just worked out today. Eff that bloodsucking bug of which we will not speak.

In 1998, I was the minister for my college friend’s wedding. That was the first time I’d ever been to New Orleans. Getting lost on a 7-hour drive from Atlanta, and ending up in the pitch dark at the gate of a 300-year-old cemetery was one of those moments where you realize this might be where you wanna be y’at, but the person you with might not feel so much so.

What I learned on that trip was that no city had a team so woven into its DNA like New Orleans. I’d grown up in Toledo, and in my childhood, I’d watched Lions and Browns fans start bandwagoning the Chicago Bears in 1985. Who didn’t? Everybody loved Refrigerator Perry. My teenage sister became a “Fridgette” overnight, and she has never liked football.

Taking in the breath of New Orleans – which honestly felt like inhaling a stanky towel into my lungs at the time, years before I adjusted to the Gulf Coast “air you can wear” – made me so angry I wanted to fight for it. I liked the east part, near Jackson Square. But that’s neither here nor there – I need to continue the story.

I hadn’t cared about an NFL team since I was a toddler watching the Steelers with my Grandpa, in protest, because some of us had to “stay in the kitchen,” and I wouldn’t. I loved Lynn Swam, Mean Joe, and Terry Bradshaw.

And when I grew to adulthood, as someone who had only loved college football before my college roommate introduced me to New Orleans and I saw firsthand how much the Saints were in that beautiful city’s DNA, I never knew how much I could love an NFL team again.

I’ve been Saints through and through. Cried my gd eyes out watching Steve Gleason block the punt, on my six-inch-screen TV, far from New Orleans. I’d just sold my antique dining room set with a discount from $300 to 20 bucks because somehow a Katrina refugee had made it from New Orleans to Toledo, Ohio – where I’d escaped to again for more misery.

A year later, I found myself in Houston, because maybe 10% of people in Toledo can make enough money to live anywhere other than the street. (Houston is not much better 20 years after the fact, but the people are nicer at least.)

The Houston Texans were the worst football team I’d ever seen in my life. David Carr was HORRIBLE. Then Matt Schaub had a decent run for a couple years, but oh my God, what an awful team. Other than JJ Watt. He was fun.

The gd football team in my adopted city was feeling a lot like the Saints of old.

Why can you NOT love two teams? Ask Mike Florio (Vikings and Steelers), Denis Leary (Patriots and Vikings), and so many others?

Once you get to a certain age, you either stay young, or you turn into until guy who stomps on his own kid’s head because the kid won’t pick a team. If you’re the latter, go fk yourself.

For the rest of us: it is OKAY to be polyteamorous. I’ve digitally met a bunch of people I consider friends, because Fk the Falcons.

But lemme throw this polyteamory guidance out there:

1. Do not pick a second team in the same division, holy fk, the only people who do this are influencers who want to twerk in front of the “hot new boba tea spot-uh”
2. Do not pick the Falcons at all. You know what, some of y’all gonna do it, I honestly give up
3. At least keep it in the region. I have a friend who is a Dolphins fan, and we just historically get on by.
4. Falcons are poop from a butthole and we gon’ either Shough up or Rattle Asslanta
5. I lived in Atlanta for 4.5 years, it was a fkn nightmare and gave me lifelong panic disorder
6. You can pick ANY TWO TEAMS YOU WANT and no teen on IG can tell you otherwise

Saints/ Texans for the chip,

Andy