Arizona Cardinals

I bleed red and black, and I have for every single painful, beautiful, maddening year of it. People laugh at us. They call us a baseball town, a snowbird market, a place where fans don't really care. Those people have never stood in State Farm Stadium on a crisp January night when the noise is rattling the roof panels and 63,000 people are losing their minds together. We are not a fairweather franchise and we are not a fairweather fan base — we are people who chose this team, many of us deliberately, in a city that gave us options. That choice means something deeper than inheritance.

 Yes, we have endured. Lord, have we endured. The Cardiac Cardinals of the '70s broke our hearts before most of us were born. The Bidwill years tested our faith like a theological exam we never signed up for. But we also had Kurt Warner leading the most improbable Super Bowl run this league has ever seen, and every single one of us who was there for that 2008 season knows we were watching something transcendent. Larry Fitzgerald in that NFC Championship game is burned into my soul permanently.

 We are a young fan base in historical terms, and that means we are still writing our story. The Cardinals haven't raised a Lombardi Trophy yet — and I emphasize yet — but when they do, the celebration in this desert is going to shake the Valley in a way nobody outside Arizona can fully anticipate. We have been patient. We have been loyal. We have shown up through the losses and the coaching carousels and the draft busts. When our moment comes, and it is coming, nobody will have earned it more than Cardinal Nation.