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I was six years old the first time I went to a Vikings game. It was a preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles, one the Vikings ended up winning 17-13. I don’t remember anything about the game itself of course. It was 17 years ago, it was a preseason game, and I really didn’t understand football at that point.

I do remember the Metrodome. I remember being staggered by how loud it was, easily the loudest thing I’d heard in my short life. I remember three straight hours of trying to turn and talk to my dad beside me and not being able to hear a word he said. I remember the feeling of being at that game, even if I don’t remember the game itself.

I’m often asked why I’m a Vikings fan. It’s a reasonable question. Even though I was born and raised in Minnesota, I have some split loyalties when it comes to sports. My dad’s Pittsburgh roots mean that I cheer for the Pirates in the MLB and the Penguins in the NHL, and people sometimes wonder how I didn’t end up a Steelers fan.

I do cheer for the Steelers, but first and foremost I pull for the Vikings. When people ask why, I usually answer with a joke. “I’m a Vikings fan so I have someone to cheer for during the regular season, a Steelers fan so I have someone to cheer for during the playoffs.” Or, “I don’t know, but it was definitely the biggest mistake of my life.”

The truth is somewhat blander. When I was growing up both the Pirates and the Penguins were terrible, so baseball and hockey weren’t ever on TV in my house. I didn’t become a fan of those sports until those teams became reasonably competent (2008 for the Penguins, 2011 for the Pirates) and those games started appearing on TV in my house.

Football was different. Football was always on, so I became a fan of that game when I was really young. Young enough that when the father of a friend told me “You’re from Minnesota, you should cheer for the Vikings”, my response was “I’m from Minnesota, I should cheer for the Vikings.” It helped that this happened in 1998, when the Vikings were torching the league with Randall Cunningham and Randy Moss on one of the most fun teams of all time. So I became a Vikings fan, and the next year my dad took me to a preseason game.

I went to another preseason game each of the next two years, and then one regular season game every year until the Metrodome closed down. I was there in 2003 when Randy Moss made one of the most spectacular plays anyone has ever made on a football field, a play that still shows up in highlight reels and commercials. I was there in 2007 when Adrian Peterson set the single game rushing record as a rookie. I was there in 2010 when Brett Favre led the largest comeback of his career to knock off the Cardinals in overtime.

There are less pleasant memories as well. Yet somehow they don't linger in such sharp definition. When I think of the Metrodome, I really only remember the positives. As much pain and heartbreak as that place saw, all of it seems washed away in my memory, until the only feeling that remains is the very first one, as a six year old boy standing in awe.

*

I’ve been to a lot of football games in my life. In addition to the Vikings games, I’ve been to a Steelers game at Heintz Field and far too many Northwestern football games. And despite this, if you asked me right now I would say that I actually prefer watching games on TV.

I am hardly alone in this opinion. The cameras get you far closer to the action than watching from the stands ever could. The stops and starts of a game can be tedious when you don’t have the ability to flip channels. And most of the time attending games comes at the cost, forcing you to miss out on any other games happening at the same time.

If you asked me why I continue to go to games, I couldn’t give you a rational answer. Just as I couldn’t explain why it was so important for me to be at the first game in US Bank Stadium. The seeds of this idea were planted as soon as construction was announced, and it remained in my head as I watched the regular updates from the construction site. It became even sharper last year when I got a job that made this financially feasible, and as soon as the schedule was set and tickets were released, I bought my seat and made plans to be there on opening night.

There was a lot of controversy around the construction of US Bank Stadium. There is always controversy when a professional sports team collects taxpayer money to build a new stadium. After all, these are pieces of multibillion dollar industries, with almost unflappable revenue streams and unlimited pocketbooks. And coming off a major economic crisis that has left local governments buried by debt and floundering to support basic necessities, it’s hard to justify tossing hundreds of millions of dollars to building a stadium.

I’m not here to argue for or against the use of public money in stadiums. I know that the economic case is full of holes, and that this is an example of a monopolistic business controlling a marketplace to line their own pocketbooks. There are plenty of good arguments for why a stadium should never have been built, why the people of Minnesota would have been smarter to tell the Vikings and the NFL to get lost.

These arguments all have some measure of validity, but on Sunday I didn’t hear even a breath of this. As nearly seventy thousand people flooded into the new stadium—$1.061 billion in cost, $498 million from public money—the only thing on anyone’s mind was football.

When it comes to football, I have a habit of getting overly analytical. In the leadup to the game I spent my time thinking about all sorts of on the field factors. How Sam Bradford would fare in his first start. Whether Adrian Peterson could get going. If the Vikings could generate enough pressure to disrupt Aaron Rodgers. Any thoughts I had about the uniqueness of this game related to the stadium itself, the staggering architecture that had left people raving around the world.

And yet when I arrived an hour and a half before kickoff, it wasn't the game or the stadium that dominated my thoughts. It was the people that filled the stadium, thousands swarming across the plaza outside and through the towering glass doors. As I wandered through the sea of figures clad in purple jerseys, my eyes rolled over the names on their backs, a swirling trip through the history of the franchise we had come together to celebrate. 

It was a truly unique perspective on the history of this team. Mixed in among stars of every era--Alan Page, John Randle, Adrian Peterson, Harrison Smith--I saw names that would provoke more laughter than reverence from outsiders. I saw more than a few Cordarrelle Patterson jerseys, remnants of his stellar but unsustainable rookie season. There was a Tarvaris Jackson, from the brief period where we tried to convince ourselves he could be the savior of the franchise. I even saw a Bernard Berrian jersey, a name that means next to nothing to most people but will always be known to Vikings fans as one of the biggest free agent busts in our history.

As the famed Purple People Eaters walked out to the coin toss, and as Hall of Fame coach Bud Grant blew the horn to announce the start of the game, I found myself surrounded by people who had actually watched these legendary figures play. People who had grown up going to games in the old Metropolitan Stadium rather than the Metrodome. People who had lived the history of the Vikings rather than just reading about it.

There is a shared history that comes with being a sports fan. To most people in the world the names Drew Pearson, Gary Anderson, and Nathan Poole would elicit nothing more than a shrug. But to Vikings fans they mean the first Hail Mary, the end of a perfect season, and a devastating loss on a last second touchdown.

And yes, I recognize the strangeness of selecting these painful memories as the examples. But that is part of being a Vikings fan, and if we're being truthful, any kind of sports fan. The triumphs and the failures stack up on either side of the scale, every new moment drawing us closer together. In that stadium on Sunday night, 55 years of Vikings history came together to be celebrated by some of the only people in the world who can truly understand it, nearly seventy thousand people joined together without having to speak a word.

*

I moved to New York City a little more than a year ago. That came after four years spent in college in Chicago, which followed my first eighteen years living in Rochester, Minnesota. Coming to this game meant flying halfway across the country for only the second time since moving out to the east coast.

As I was making my plans to leave New York, a few of my coworkers asked what I was planning to do with my time off. At first I started to say I was headed home, but each time I caught myself. Is Minnesota still really my home? I grew up there, I spent more time there than anywhere else, and it was a major part of making me who I am. But it’s not home anymore, is it?

But if Minnesota isn’t my home, where is? I certainly never considered Chicago home, and it feels strange to call New York home either. Maybe someday, after a few more years, once I decide whether or not it’s a place I want to settle for a significant period of time. But I don’t consider myself a New Yorker, and I never will.

I’m not a New Yorker, but I can’t really call myself a Minnesotan either. The last two years of college I spent the summers in Chicago, and I don’t think I’ve spent more than a week straight in Minnesota since 2013. And while I wouldn’t rule it out, I doubt that will ever happen again.

The only family members I have in the state are my parents, and they’re already discussing potentially moving after they retire in a few years. If that happens, what reason will I have to come back to the state? High school reunions, and maybe an occasional wedding? Even most of my friends have moved away, spread across dozens of states and even a few countries.

I am hardly the first to go through this. According to the 2010 census, only 59 percent of the US population was born in the state they currently occupy. Nearly half our country is made up of transplants, and even though migration rates have been trending down over the past thirty years, it is still fair to say that the age of the easily defined home is over.

When the stadium issue was being discussed in Minnesota, I wasn’t too troubled by the threat of the team leaving for another city. After all, I had moved to another city as well, so what right did I have to hold it against them? With the ability to watch any game from any place in the country, what did it really mean for them to be the “Minnesota” Vikings?

On Sunday I got my answer. I flew in the morning before the game, after spending a couple days with friends in Chicago. Throughout O’Hare Airport I saw a rainbow of NFL colors. A JJ Watt jersey, a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt, a man wearing—and I am dead serious about all of this—green and yellow Nikes below green and yellow striped overalls over an Aaron Rodgers jersey, all topped off by a giant piece of foam cheese on his head. On my flight there were at least four other people wearing Vikings jerseys. Maybe headed to the game like me, maybe just flying back to Minnesota for some other reason. I didn’t stop to ask any of them, but I did exchange a few knowing nods.

This is the power of the community of a sporting team. We spread across the country and the world, but we are still tied together by this piece of our former home. Anywhere I go I can meet a fellow Vikings fan, and we can understand some small part of each other just by the shared experiences of cheering for this team.

There were 66,813 people in attendance at Sunday’s game. I can’t tell you how many were Vikings fans, how many were Packers fans, or how many were fans of other teams, like my dad seated next to me or the guy in the Khalil Mack jersey a row ahead. I can only imagine how many different places they traveled from to get there. By pure chance I ended up sitting six rows ahead of a friend of mine from high school, someone I haven’t seen in four years. He’s living in Iowa now, after having spent some time in Spain. But on Sunday, we both came back to Minnesota. To our home.

That’s what this stadium is. It is a home for the Vikings, but it is a home for Vikings fans as well. I have no idea where I’ll be living over the rest of my life. New York, Chicago, Minnesota. Anything could happen. But no matter where I go, I will be a Vikings fan. And even ten years from now, when I could otherwise find no reason to come back to the state where I lived my first eighteen years, I’ll make a trip back to US Bank Stadium, to watch my team with my scattered neighbors again.

The Vikings won the game by the way. Years from now I doubt I’ll remember much of what happened. I probably won’t be able to tell you that Stefon Diggs had 182 yards. I won’t remember Trae Waynes’s game sealing interception, or the half dozen penalties he was called for prior to that. I won’t remember where my seats were or what the score was. But I’ll remember that I was there.