MINNEAPOLIS – The history of the Minnesota Vikings, who are playing in their 57th and perhaps most promising season, is a history that's marked by high hopes that are always dashed, typically in the most painful of ways.
A conversation with a Vikings fan is like experiencing the sports version of post-traumatic stress disorder. They relive past indignities as reasons why no matter what goes right today, something will go wrong tomorrow. Sure, there were four Super Bowl appearances during the Purple People Eater heyday of the 1970s – but what's a Super Bowl appearance without a Super Bowl victory other than one more reminder of why things will never quite go your way? Would you rather be a Vikings fan (0-4 in Super Bowls, with a four-decade Super Bowl drought) or a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise which in 41 mostly ignominious seasons has played in exactly one Super Bowl – but won that game and has that memory forever?
Vikings fans can rattle off the most heartbreaking moments of their history as if they were rites of passage into true Vikings fandom. Perhaps it was that third Super Bowl appearance back in the 1970s, a defensive struggle in which the Vikings turned the ball over four times in the first three quarters – yet still pulled within three points in the fourth quarter after blocking a punt and recovering it in the end zone. But then Fran Tarkenton threw a late interception, and the game was all but over.
Or perhaps it was the Gary Anderson "wide left" field goal in the NFC championship game after the 1998 season, his only missed field goal of the year, and the one that cost the 15-1 Vikings another Super Bowl berth. Or maybe Adrian Peterson's two fumbles and then Brett Favre's late interception in the NFC championship game after the 2009 season. Or maybe it's the most recent entry in the Vikings heartbreak ledger, the Blair Walsh shanked field goal in the 2015 wild-card game, one of the coldest games in NFL history.
All Vikings fans have their own seminal moment when they realized their team was cursed to its existence of high hopes, forever dashed.
Yet they keep the faith.
And perhaps this season is why.
On Sunday, in the same stadium which will host Super Bowl LII on Feb. 4, the Vikings secured the franchise's first first-round playoff bye since the 2009 season, the year of the Favre interception that led to the Vikings NFC championship game loss to the New Orleans Saints. They beat the Chicago Bears in a way befitting these 13-3 Vikings: A methodical defensive bashing, in which the Vikings held the Bears to 201 offensive yards (and zero offensive touchdowns) while keeping possession of the ball for nearly two-thirds of the game. This is what the Vikings do now, the hallmark of the Mike Zimmer era. This is the NFL's stingiest defense, in yards allowed and in points allowed, reminiscent of those Purple People Eaters from the 1970s. And this is and one of the NFL's best offenses at holding onto the ball – zero turnovers on Sunday, and only 14 turnovers on the season, better than all but two teams in the league.
"I don't think we do anything fancy," Zimmer said after the game in his typically understated fashion. "I think we just got good players."
Yet the Vikings have had good players before. And things haven't worked out. Which is what led one reporter to ask Zimmer – not this reporter, but I certainly was thinking it – in the postgame press conference: "Do you believe in the curse?"
"What curse?" Zimmer replied. "Who asked that one? What curse?"
The curse, of course, of a team that's historically been snakebitten. And not in a Cleveland-Browns-of-the-past-few-generations way, either. The Browns are a laughingstock. The Vikings are not, and never have been. They are something that's perhaps even more sinister: A franchise filled with almosts and not-quites, a franchise that's often been able to smell the promised land but has never been able to taste it, to reach it.
"I don't know," Zimmer said. "I don't think there's any curse. I've got a crystal ball and I've got a wood spirit hanging in my office. So there's no damn curse."
This is the thing with these Vikings: They have made it to 13-3 and a first-round bye in the most un-Viking way possible. They've been good, certainly – very good, perhaps the most complete roster in the NFL, and a team that plays close to mistake-free football. But also: They've been lucky. Lucky that, when a season-ending injury happened to starting quarterback Sam Bradford – the type of injury that can tank a season, much like last year's season-ending injury to starting quarterback Teddy Bridgewater did – the unproven guy who stepped in was Case Keenum. And Keenum's been nothing short of spectacular, tops in the NFL among active quarterbacks in ESPN's total QBR stat. He hasn't been the type of quarterback who wins fantasy football championships with absurd stats, but he's been the perfect quarterback for this team – yes, better than Bradford and better than Bridgewater, throwing 22 touchdowns to only seven interceptions and with a mobility that Bradford never had, and that is essential to a team that doesn't have one of the league's best offensive lines. And when promising rookie running back Dalvin Cook went down with a torn ACL, the Vikings' depth at running back made that injury a lot more digestible.
And the defense? Well, in a season where the NFL has been devastated by big-time injuries – Aaron Rodgers and Andrew Luck, J.J. Watt and Eric Berry, an epidemic so pervasive that it inspired a Sports Illustrated cover, "Carnage: Inside the NFL's Season of Pain" – the Vikings defense has remained, mostly, intact.
Maybe Zimmer's onto something with that wooden spirit hanging in his office.
I asked Brian Robison, a Vikings defensive end since 2007 and someone who is well-versed in the franchise's history of bad luck, if it seemed like this franchise's misfortune had, this year, finally turned into good fortune.
Robison stared at me stone-faced, then he turned his back to me and rapped his fist on his wooden locker three times. Curse or not, nobody wants to jinx this good thing the Vikings have got going.
"I just think for us we just stay focused at the task at hand," Robinson said. "We don't get enamored with injuries or guys being healthy or anything like that. For us, we understand this is the 2017 Minnesota Vikings, and what happened in the past is in the past. All we can control is what we're in right now."
And what the Vikings are in right now is this: The catbird's seat in the NFC. As Zimmer pointed out to his team before Sunday's game, the past five years, every NFC representative in the Super Bowl has been a team that had a first-round bye. The other team that has a first-round bye this year – and the team that has home-field advantage through the playoffs – is the Philadelphia Eagles. But the Eagles suffered their own fit of bad luck a few weeks ago, when starting quarterback (and MVP candidate) Carson Wentz tore his ACL. Nick Foles has been solid as his replacement, but ask yourself: Come playoff time, would you rather have the backup quarterback who has started since September (Keenum), or the backup quarterback who has started since December (Foles)?
Vikings fans know that you should never expect anything to go according to plan. The most perfect situations create the most painful heartbreaks. The players know this too. "We know the history," offensive lineman Joe Berger told me in the locker room after Sunday's win. "That's part of being a Viking. You know the history of it. But at the same time, that doesn't control anything going forward."
It doesn't. Going forward for the Vikings will be this: A spell of much-needed rest, then a home playoff game in two weekends. Win that game and it's back to the NFC championship game for the first time since losing to the Saints in overtime at the end of the 2009 season.
And next? Well, Super Bowl LII will be right here in U.S. Bank Stadium on Feb. 4. No team has ever played a home-game Super Bowl.
But, like Berger said, whatever we want to think about curses and luck, the past does not determine the future. On Sunday, the Vikings won a first-round bye. Before Sunday, no team had ever won a first-round bye during a season in which they host the Super Bowl.
"Maybe," shrugged Zimmer, "lightning is going to strike."
