This Weekend, It’s Cincinnati Sunday
My hometown team is in the Super Bowl for the first time in my life
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Let’s get one thing out of the way — I do not care about football. Sorry, but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m here because if there’s one thing I do care about, like a lot, like maybe too much, it’d my hometown, Cincinnati, Ohio.
I don’t currently live there due to a complicated tangle of reasons, but my love knows no distance. So, even if I care zero percent about football, I am actually actively aware of which weekend the Super Bowl takes place this year (it’s this weekend, for my fellow non-football fans).
Growing up in a suburb of Cincinnati, my relationship with the Super Bowl existed only because of my father.
Every year, he’d put on the game for us to watch “as a family,” and I would sit on the couch reading a book. I’d set my stories aside during commercials so I could be in the know (believe it or not, they didn’t used to be available next day on YouTube). Try though I might, I could never get interested in the game with all its starts and stops and pauses in between.
Once I left for college, I lost track of the Super Bowl. Even if I did care about football, I’d have been a Bengals fan, so I wouldn’t have had a stake in the big game.
The Cincinnati Bengals, if you didn’t know, haven’t been to the Super Bowl since 1988 (a few years before I was born).
I know this because, when my dad texted me to say the Bengals were going to the Super Bowl, I realized how unfamiliar the sentence sounded, so I looked it up.
So, even though I don’t care about football, a part of me is kind of excited about the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday.
In fact, I have Googled the date at least twice to make sure I don’t miss it, which is as unprecedented as hearing the word “Cincinnati Bengals” during the Super Bowl in my lifetime.
You see, I have big plans for how to celebrate this occasion. And like most of my Cincinnati-related plans, they are food related.
Even though there’s no substitute for eating my way through my hometown IRL, there are a few grocery store staples I can get here in Pittsburgh…
