Lacking any real need to be delivered from the weather elements, for this year’s “Cabin Fever” issue I find myself contemplating other aspects of this time of year that traditionally chill me to the bone. I am, of course, talking about this point in the sports calendar immediately following football’s Super Bowl and preceding baseball’s Spring training.

At the risk of sounding like a man embarking on a 12-step program of recovery, my name is Jim and I am a serial fan of losing sports teams.  Feels good to get that off my chest. Allow me to continue.  You see in the midst of this unusually mild winter, I am still – as usual at this time of year – coming to terms with the reality that my beloved New York Jets have not won the Super Bowl. They didn’t even make it to the playoffs this year, despite the over-the-top promises of their brash coach. I haven’t quite determined if this year’s disappointment is worse than the past two when the Jets did make the playoffs, progressing heroically only to lose their conference championship game. That’s the game that if they won, would have gotten them into the Super Bowl last year and the year before for the first time since January 12, 1969 – when I was 20-months-old, and not yet initiated into the world of sports fandom.

During this year’s Super Bowl I found myself reluctantly rooting for the eventual winner – the New York Giants. Every year, because my Jets are nowhere to be found on Super Bowl Sunday, I pick the team least distasteful to me. Under most circumstances that would be anyone playing against the Giants, but this year they happened to be playing against the only team I like less than them – the New England Patriots.  So I jumped on the New Yawk bandwagon, and enjoyed the melancholy, hollow G-men victory.

Although fair game because they are a New York team, I am just not a New York Giants fan. Never have been. Never will be. For that matter, I am not a New York Yankees fan. I am a New York Mets fan. Always have been. Always will be. And I am a New York Rangers hockey fan and a New York Knicks basketball fan. Always have been. Always will be.

Our sports allegiances – those now shared with me by my 10-year-old son – suggest that we are painfully loyal, and sadly delusional, hoping each year that these teams will produce anything more than the one baseball World Series and the one hockey Stanley Cup that my favorite sports teams have yielded since I began following sports in earnest in the mid-1970s. It bears noting that over that same span, the  Yankees have won seven World Series, and the Giants have earned four Super Bowl titles. And don’t get me started about the four straight Stanley Cups won by the New York Islanders beginning in 1980 – one year after my sainted Rangers lost to the Montreal Canadians in the Stanley Cup Finals.

One might think that I would have low self-esteem as a result of the consistent futility of the teams for which I root. In fact there was a time when this was actually so, but age and experience with more important things in life help me keep things in perspective. But I still get the blues at this time of year – the never-ending video loop of someone else’s team showered in confetti, hoisting the Super Bowl trophy overhead fresh on my mind. This annual rite followed immediately by the recognition that Spring training starts over the next few weeks, to usher in my perennial, fleeting hope for my cherished Mets, followed quickly by the reality that they are a woefully mismanaged franchise, destined for yet another mediocre season. And even with my intellectual capacity to know better, I will root with all of my heart for my Metskies to defy logic. Always have. Always will.

So why do I do this to myself? And more importantly, why have I passed this dysfunctional fanaticism on to my son?  It kills me to watch him struggle with the same Charlie Brown feelings that I experienced as a young boy as classmates whose local teams actually win, miss no chance to point out the disparity between our teams and theirs. My explanation is a simple one: We were born this way. Although not technically genetic, this rooting gene is the legacy of my grandfather – who arrived as a teenager in New York in the mid-1920s from Ireland in search of a better life.

My grandfather had left behind the political unrest and civil war of his homeland and had made his way to Queens, NY to start his American tale amid a newfound culture that included American baseball and football. He met my grandmother – an indentured servant also here from Ireland – they married and settled in Queens. My father has explained to me that at the time that my grandfather emigrated here, baseball allegiances especially were dictated by the neighborhoods in which one lived. If you lived in the Bronx you were a Yankees fan; if in Brooklyn a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and if you lived in Manhattan or Queens you were a NY baseball Giants fan. These provincial identities stuck until the Dodgers and Giants relocated to California in the 1950s. While some Dodgers and Giants fans began pulling for the Yankees, the New York Metropolitans’ arrival on the baseball scene in 1962 was met with a fan base starved for a team of their own. That the Mets played their home games at Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens made it all the more convenient for my grandfather and father to put down our family’s baseball rooting roots for good.

As far as football is concerned, my father tells me that my grandfather and he were actually New York Giants fans before the New York Titans emerged on the scene in the 1960s.  But the Titans became the Jets, and like the Mets, the Jets played their games in Queens, so the Jets became the family’s football team of choice. Our family’s pro hockey and basketball rooting foundations were formed by way of  similar provincial themes.

Fast forward to the mid-1970s. My parents had moved us to Long Island from Queens for more elbow room in 1967 after I was born. A few years later, after my grandmother passed away, my grandfather joined us on Long Island – bringing with him his beautiful color television set and his magic transistor radio. And from the summer of 1974 until he passed away in 1979, my grandfather used those miracles of technology to share with me his passion for the Mets, the Jets, Knicks and Rangers.  And for better or for worse, from those days forward, I wedded myself to those teams – never to be torn asunder.

Despite the ineptitudes of the teams for which I root, I am proud of that aspect of my character that has never even considered switching teams. In my house I have two autographed baseballs that once graced the antique hutch in my grandfather’s bedroom in my childhood home on Long Island. To this day, I can look at those baseballs and hear the shuffle of my grandfather’s steps as he approached that color television or that radio to switch on a ball game. With an analog click in my mind’s ear I am transported back to a day when the most important thing in the world was the crack of a bat, or the sound of a referee’s whistle. I know my son already shares this passion. And I know it’s not such a bad thing if that passion informs his character, regardless of how many championships the teams for which we root might win. Lets go Mets!