I wanted to share with you a funny story about when I first moved to the Fox Cities.  Having spent a good number of my formative years in the Detroit area, I was accustomed to going to a game whenever I wanted to.  Going to a football game was a lot like a late April afternoon major league baseball game; you’d buy tickets for the cheapest seats available, and as soon as the game started you’d improve on your seats, moving down row after row, until you had some pretty good seats.  Especially in the Silverdome, where you could pack 80,000+ fans in, but you really only needed about 30,000 seats.

So I wanted to take my new wife to a Packer game.

I called the ticket office and a nice woman answered the phone.  I explained that I wanted to buy two tickets to the next home game.  She told me that there was a waiting list for season tickets that was thousands of names long.  I said “No problem - I’m not looking for season tickets.  I just want a pair of regular tickets for the next home game.”  “Um, they’re all season tickets, sir” she replied. 

This is when I began to realize that different communities supported their teams in different ways, and to different degrees.  In Detroit, back when their home field was the Silverdome, the total number of season ticket holders was around 10,000 (out of 80,000 seats).  If a game didn’t sell out, it wasn’t televised (unless the balance of tickets was “purchased” by the Ford family) - this meant a lot of home games went untelevised.  We had no idea whether the Lions won unless we watched the news or listened on the radio.

As you know, it’s quite a bit different in Green Bay.

Thankfully, I was able to leverage a new friendship I had made here and was able to get a pair of tickets to the Bishop’s charity game, and was able to enjoy a game.  For the heck of it I put my name on the list for season tickets, but I’m not holding my breath.  Last I heard, given the rate of people relinquishing their season tickets and my place on the list, it’d take something like a thousand years before that nice woman I spoke to on the phone would call me to tell me I could now buy those tickets I was after.Â