Why does one choose to live in Wisconsin, or for that matter, attend school in this state? Is it the great weather? The privilege of living in the "dairy state?" Eating cheese curds and having the ability to proclaim that you currently reside in the state with one of the most overly obese populations in the union? It must be one of these things, because it surely couldn't be because you want to root for the sports teams in this state.

It's time to call a spade a spade: this state has been hanging its hat on the Packers winning the Super Bowl in 1997. When was the last time one of our sports teams won a major championship in anything else?

Never, that's when.

Let's take a little time to analyze what's going on. We haven't even had a real major league baseball team in the last 15 or so years.

Oh, some rich guy in California just bought the team and now we're going to be competitive, you say? Sure, I'll buy my World Series ticket for 30 years from now, when the Brewers leave Milwaukee and relocate to Nantucket or somewhere and start winning.

The only way I foresee the Brewers going to the Series is if they move to Atlanta and start calling themselves the Braves.

Moving back to the Packers, they should get some type of award for wasting the last eight years of Brett Favre's life with a less-than-stellar supporting class. To put it nicely, the Packers played defense this year as well as Howard Dean delivered campaign speeches. There was a lot of screaming and gurgling about what they were going to do, but in the end, they just ended up red in the face, looking like idiots, and lost.

As for the Bucks? They haven't fielded a decent team since some guy named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for them. Yeah, they had the team that went to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2000-'01, but phrases such as "sharing the ball" and "passing" weren't part of their already limited vocabularies.

This brings us to another question: why bother to watch these teams if there's not a chance of winning?

For one, there's the camaraderie of cheering for the losing team and commiserating after the loss. There's the joy of that rare big victory. There's yelling, "Git R' Done!" with your friends at random times for no reason.

Of course, my column may prove all but irrelevant if these teams win the championship in the upcoming year. But what fun would that be?

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Jan. 27 2005.