Jared Goff and the Lions: The NFL's most unlikely love story - ESPN

THE STORY OF Megan Stefanski's devotion to the Detroit Lions is a story of loss.

She has witnessed hundreds of losses since she goes to every game, home and away, and for most of her 44 years, the city's football franchise has been an exercise in finding clever and torturous ways to not win games. She lost her father, Donnie — who most people called Yooperman because the Stefanskis come from Michigan's Upper Peninsula — and who was as committed to seeing the Lions (mostly lose) live as his daughter. He missed his granddaughter's baptism because it conflicted with a football Sunday.

Yooperman was born in December 1957, about two weeks before the Lions won their third championship that decade. He died in 2019, about a week before the season, without seeing them so much as come close to another title. Before he had the chance to see this iteration of the Lions, the team that finally holds so much promise.

Last January, when the Lions hosted their first playoff game in 30 years, Detroit lost its collective sanity. The going rate to get into Ford Field was $1,200, and Megan insists she had the only empty seat in the stadium.

She brought her father's ashes in a miniature urn. They sat in the seat beside hers in Section 100.

Before that game, when the Lions beat the Rams and Matthew Stafford, their old hometown hero, the stadium roared the name of the quarterback who took Stafford's place. The Jared Goff chant was born that night, and in the year since, would go on to spring up at Lions road games, and Pistons games, and a high school cheerleading competition, and a Green Day concert.

«Jared Goff» chants broke out in Santa Clara