I genuinely feel bad for Detroit Lions fans this morning. I really do.

Now, that's not because the Lions did what they have done every year since their last championship in 1957, which is not winning a championship. I feel bad this morning because they got a whole town believing that it was different this time; they were going to end a 60-year-old drought.

Once again, the Lions were playing the role of Lucy pulling the football away at the last minute. Once again, Detroit Lions fans were playing the role of Charlie Brown, ending up flat on their back, wondering what in the hell just happened.

This is a Tale As Old As Time in Detroit. For over a decade, I was a Detroit Lions season ticket holder during the still most significant era without winning a championship, which was when Barry Sanders was the best running back in the league. 

If my memory still serves, I witnessed every game he played at the Pontiac Silverdome minus one. The Lions had halfway decent teams during the 90s yet ultimately wasted Barry's talent. He retired a lock for the Hall of Fame but only got close to the Super Bowl once in 1991, when the Washington Redskins crushed them in the NFC championship.

I finally gave up the ghost of dedicating my time and money to this team every week right before the year that they went 0-16. This was not because I had some premonition of what was coming, but I just got tired of the Ford family sticking it to the fans with another price increase during the Matt Millen era. 

Oddly enough, the Ford family, which has owned the team since 1963, went ahead, and before the Lions had even secured the NFC North for the first time since the league had realigned the divisions, raised prices, in some cases an astronomical amount, as was mentioned here.

Paxton has four seats in Section 103, the first row behind the Lions bench near the tunnel, that have been in his family since the 1950s. He, his wife, Vera, and their 15-year-old son, Joshua, go to a handful of the Lions home games every year. He sells the tickets to several games a season for a profit, and gives some to family or friends at face value.

This season, he paid $5,536 for the seats. Next year, the same seats will cost $13,616, according to invoices Paxton shared with the Free Press — a 146% increase in price.

Paxton checked his invoice over and over to make sure he was reading it right. Then he hopped online and saw other Lions fans complaining about the invoices they received.

I'm glad to see that some things never change and most likely never will.

Not.

So, while I was forbidden by some friends to watch the game because the only one I watched from beginning to end this year, the Lions lost, I did not watch last night's game and instead worked on some writing and other things I've been putting off. I was not rooting against the team, but I told many people that the Lions had yet to change until they proved they could win it all.

When I finally checked in on the score after the game was done, I was not surprised to read this here.

In a season that had been about the Detroit Lions exorcising their demons, it was the San Francisco 49ers who got revenge, 66 years in the making, on Sunday night at Levi's Stadium.

The 49ers overcame the identical 17-point halftime deficit they surrendered to the Lions in the 1957 Western Conference Championship, surging past the visiting team and into a Super Bowl matchup with the Kansas City Chiefs, 34-31.

With the defeat, the Lions have fallen short of playing in a Super Bowl for the 58th consecutive year of the event's existence, doing so in one of the most heartbreaking ways imaginable. It leaves the franchise, and the city that never ceases to support it, dreaming of a title that has eluded them since that 1957 season.

Having not watched the team this year, I've had to rely on other people to tell me their style of play.

Allegedly, they are playing a stricter brand of smashmouth football, and the team has been resilient and bounced back from many adversities that they have faced this year. Third-year head coach Dan Campbell (who, from what I've seen, I like) is a bit of a gambler, and his gambles of going for first downs instead of kicking two field goals last night when given the opportunity came back and bit him in the butt.

If that's a style of play that got them to the dance, their first NFC Championship berth in over 30 years, so be it. Yet, that style also was what defeated his team.

However, the one thing that has stayed the same since my glorious birth--50-some-odd years ago--is that the Detroit Lions seem to be incapable of getting to the big game and winning it. People will say a lot of things about that statement, but it's as factual as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Dan Campbell and his team could bounce back from this and hopefully this time, not be too exuberant about winning a meaningless NFC North title and looking at it the same way that Kobe Bryant treated division titles with the LA Lakers.

They are meaningless because they were meant to win championships.

Possibly, one of the wealthiest NFL families in the league will one day truly appreciate the fan base and not rake them over the coals the minute they have any mild success. For over four decades, all they have done is offer empty platitudes and lobby for taxpayer money to spend lavishly on public works boondoggles they could pay for themselves. 

While I'm not holding my breath for any of that to happen, I'm reminded that once again, the 2023-2024 Detroit Lions ended up being the Detroit Lions of old and still found exciting and infuriating ways to blow a game. Until they can get to the Super Bowl and actually raise the Vince Lombardi Trophy, my attitude with them, and painfully so, in regards to this incredibly hard-working and devoted town that Detroit is, will be this. 

To be the man, you have to beat the man.

The man in this instance is the ghost of Detroit Lions' failures of the past, and I refuse to believe all of that slick marketing nonsense that this team has been pedaling all the years that I've lived on planet Earth.

Win big or go home.