The Vegas Golden Knights gave me a team to finally call my own

The puck drops in the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals Monday evening, and with it, the Vegas Golden Knights look to close out the most amazing expansion season in modern North American sports history. They’ve set numerous records in their inaugural season, and will look to cap it with Lord Stanley’s cup.

Regardless of what happens over the next two weeks, the Golden Knights have had unprecedented success off the ice. When you are at capacity for your practices and have a lengthy line of people hoping a seat comes available, things are going well.

These capacity practices have been going on for much of the season, thanks to a local fanbase starved for a professional sports team to call its own. For sports fans who grew up in Las Vegas, more often than not you got to dictate your fandom. The Golden Knights are the first team that truly “chose” the community. It’s the first opportunity to cheer for a hometown professional team.

For a large percentage of sports fans, you do not pick a team, your team picks you. You are born in a city or state with certain professional teams. Or, your family has long attended a given college, and so you are all fans of Notre Dame or Florida State or Georgia or pick your major college program.

The Golden Knights present a fresh experience, quite literally unlike anything Las Vegas sports fans have ever experienced. Rooting for a hometown team is distinctly different than rooting for an adopted team through which you have a limited connection at best. This is a rare opportunity when you move beyond childhood to get this kind of new experience as a sports fan.

I was born in Las Vegas in 1979, and spent my childhood there. Growing up in Las Vegas, my local teams of choice were UNLV basketball and football (primarily basketball) and the Las Vegas Stars, then a Triple-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres. I had a brief flirtation with the Las Vegas Silver Streaks of the World Basketball League, but they moved to Nashville after two seasons. Long live Freddie Banks!

Without a hometown pro team, my professional allegiances have wandered for much of my life. Las Vegas is no longer the same transient town it used to be, but my brother and I were first generation Las Vegans. My dad moved to the area by way of New England, while my mom moved there by way of Michigan. My dad in particular was a big sports fan, but we were open to picking who we wanted to root for as kids.

As a kid, I jumped on the “good part” of Boston sports bandwagon, latching on to the Red Sox and Celtics. I’ll never deny that Las Vegas has always been a front-runner city when it comes to its local sports, and so it is no surprise that as a child of the 80s, I became a San Francisco 49ers fan.

In the years since, I have remained a 49ers fan, but other leanings have ebbed a flowed. I was a Wade Boggs fan as a kid, and so to my dad’s horror, I became a Yankees fan when Boggs signed with them after the 1992 season. In 2003, I became an intern with the Oakland A’s and later a full time employee. I transitioned to becoming an A’s fan. I left after five seasons, and while I remained a fan, I was not the diehard fan like the core of the A’s fanbase. I moved to Washington, DC and became a “A’s in the AL, Nationals in the NL” fan.

Which brings us to the Vegas Golden Knights.

The NHL announced in 2016 that Las Vegas would get an expansion hockey team. I have always enjoyed attending hockey games, but I was never passionate for a given team. I followed the Bruins a bit as a kid, the Capitals during college, the Sharks when I lived in the Bay Area, and the Caps again when I returned to DC in 2012 — but none of these teams were ever “my team.” I could get fired up at games, but in between it was sort of a “meh” fan existence.

Over the past two years however, I have been able to gain a team I can call my own. I love the 49ers, but I got to pick them. Fans can pick whomever they please, but when you have your own hometown team, there is a special connection to it. Just ask Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper.

Harper grew up in Las Vegas, and was left to pick an assortment of professional teams to root for as a kid. People mocked him for picking popular teams like the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees*, but those people don’t understand what it’s like to grow up without a team of your own.

*As a Las Vegas native, his choice of Duke basketball is something I will never forgive.

If you are left to pick your own teams, of course you’re going to pick a popular and/or good team. I don’t know anybody who would willingly pick the Cleveland Browns as “their team” if they had a completely free choice of every NFL team.

But as Harper told the media during the Golden Knights miracle run, he finally truly understands what it’s like to cheer on his hometown team.

“I come out and play baseball every day, and I love doing it, but it’s also a job as well,” Harper said. “If I don’t play well, I know I got to go play well the next day. Being a fan, I understand when they lose, and I get it. I’m not going to go: ‘Oh, man. This guy’s got to go earn his contract!’ It’s like, I understand both sides now. It’s a lot of fun to be able to watch these guys, root for them, get excited and nervous and respect what they’re doing at the same time.”

I’ve invested enough time over my life in the 49ers to live and die with the team. But that took time to build. For my Golden Knights fandom, I’ve felt that since day one. As a football fan in particular, it has been rough in recent years with a certain fan fatigue that comes with spending your life cheering for a team.

Win or lose over the next two weeks, the Golden Knights were able to do this for the millions of people like myself who grew up in Las Vegas without a team to truly call our own.