OTL: Ravens Fans Near & Far – Vermont Raven

In this series, my goal is to tell the interesting stories of Ravens fans.  Maybe you were born and raised in Maryland and have been a lifelong fan.  Perhaps you moved to the Maryland and became a fan.  Perhaps you followed a player for the college game to the Ravens.  Perhaps you came to be a Ravens fan in a completely different way.  Do you have unique Ravens game-day traditions that you would like to share?

For this first edition, I will share my unique story of how I became a Ravens fan.  I grew up in the state of Iowa until age 12.  I became a Philadelphia Eagles fan for reasons I can’t completely remember, other than I liked their uniforms and my oldest brother was a fan.  I continued following the Eagles through high school, even after moving to North Carolina at age 12.

While I was in college at Western Carolina University from 2003-2007, my girlfriend at the time (now wife) was attending dental school at the University of Maryland-Baltimore School of Dentistry.  Her apartment was just up the road from the stadium, and she could hear the stadium erupt whenever the Ravens scored.  That’s when I started to pay attention to the Ravens.  I still cheered for the Eagles, but I fell in love with the Ravens’ hard-nosed style of play and really enjoyed watching them whenever I could.  My wife and I were married in 2007.  We moved to the state of Georgia, where we lived for three years from 2007-2010.  In 2009, the Philadelphia Eagles signed Michael Vick.  As an animal lover, I found it impossible to cheer for the Eagles.  Since then, I have been solely a Baltimore Ravens fan.

In 2010, my wife and I moved to Vermont.  In Vermont, of course we have unfortunately been surrounded by some of the most obnoxious fans in sports, Patriots fans!  We were at the game in Gillette Stadium January 2012 where we experienced the agony of the Lee Evans drop and the Billy Cundiff missed field goal to eliminate the Ravens and send the Patriots to the Super Bowl.  It was sickening seeing the obnoxious Patriots fans celebrating all around us.

Fortunately, we were also at Gillette Stadium again the following year in January 2013 when the Ravens took down the Patriots in the AFC Championship game and of course later went on to win the Super Bowl!  Luckily, we were in a section that had several Ravens fans and the Patriots fans in our particular section weren’t too obnoxious!  During the game, we had our coats unzipped and were showing off our Ravens jerseys!  My wife was wearing a Terrell Suggs jersey, and I was repping Haloti Ngata.  After the clock hit zero, while we were riding high and stoked that the Ravens were headed to the Super Bowl, we quickly realized the atmosphere around us was quite scary.  Obnoxious Patriots fans were looking for celebrating Ravens fans and starting fights.  My wife and I zipped up our coats, covering our Ravens jerseys, and were doing everything we could to hide our excitement as we walked quickly back to our car.  Once we were on the road back to Vermont, we were celebrating like crazy!  My wife and I are still avid Ravens fans to this day.  We have enjoyed the relative silence from fair-weather Patriots fans since Brady left!

If you are interested in having your story shared, reach out to me. Private message me (VermontRaven) on the RSR forums, email me at ve**********@***oo.com, or hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @VermontRaven.

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