The rivalry was forty years old. I’d been warned. My friends — all home-team fans, lifelong, insufferable — had made me watch a documentary about it before they’d let me buy the jersey. I bought the jersey anyway, because I was born in the rival’s city and loyalty isn’t a personality I chose, it’s a fact I brought with me.
Game day, we got separated in the tailgate crowd. My phone died. My friends vanished into a sea of flags. And a stranger in home-team colors grabbed my elbow, said “You’re going to get beer thrown at you, come with me if you want to keep that jersey clean,” and marched me into the most decorated RV in the lot.
Inside, it was chaos: two TVs, a crockpot, pennants from forty seasons, a framed photo of a man holding a baby in front of the same RV in 1998. The stranger — Sloane, per the family photos everywhere — sat me on the counter seat and started straightening my collar, my sleeve, my life.
“This lot has two hundred home team fans,” I whispered, while she worked on my collar like the jersey had personally offended her. “I counted the flags. I’m wearing the enemy’s colors. You just locked the RV door. And the game starts in an hour.”
“Forty-one minutes.”
“Even worse.”
She didn’t answer. She leaned in instead, cheek brushing my jaw, home-team gold glowing warm in her hair, and the crowd noise outside faded to a heartbeat.
“If your brother comes back from the grill,” I breathed, “he’ll find a rival fan in his family’s RV wearing his sister’s jacket. Your family takes this rivalry very seriously. I saw the documentary. There’s a section about your family.”
“There’s a section about my dad crying in 2011.”
“I saw that too.”
The handle rattled. “Sloane? Why’s the door locked? I need the mustard!”
Sloane didn’t move. She looked at me — the whole question in one look — and I nodded, because some decisions take a lifetime and some take eleven seconds.
She unlocked the door. Her brother climbed in holding the mustard, took in the scene with the speed of a man raised on this rivalry: his sister, the rival jersey, his jacket around my shoulders, our faces too close.
He looked at us. Looked at my jersey. Set the mustard down slowly, like it was evidence.
“Well,” he said. “Dad’s going to need to sit down.”
Dad, when informed, did need to sit down — but only for a moment, and only to laugh, because it turned out the forty-year rivalry had a secret chapter nobody put in the documentary: Sloane’s parents had met the exact same way in 1987, at the exact same stadium, rival colors, her mother in the enemy’s jersey and her father “rescuing” her into this very RV, which he’d bought with his first adult paycheck because “it’s where I met your mother, so it’s family.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“There’s a reason I walked you in here,” Sloane admitted. “I saw the jersey and I thought — forty years is long enough for the universe to run the same play twice.”
We watched the game from the family section, and during the national anthem she took my hand, in front of two hundred home-team fans, in enemy colors, and held it. Her brother saw. Her mother saw. Her father — the man from the 2011 crying section — saw, nodded once, and went back to his chili.
My team lost by three. Nobody in that RV celebrated. Sloane drove me to my hotel after and said, “Next game’s at your stadium. I’ll wear your colors. Fair’s fair.”
I showed up to that game with a jersey for her. She wore it. Her family watched from the home broadcast and sent a group photo of all of them wearing HALF her jersey colors photoshopped onto rival merch.
We’ve done every season since. Two rival games a year, one jersey swap per game, and one rule that the family enforces with the gravity of scripture: whoever’s stadium hosts, the other wears the colors.
The documentary got a sequel last fall. There’s a new section. It’s about us, it’s four minutes long, and it ends on the aerial shot of the RV lot with the narrator saying, “Some rivalries are inherited. This one, apparently, is contagious.”
Dad cried again in 2011. He cried again at the sequel premiere. He says it’s tradition.
Sloane says it’s genetics. She keeps the framed photo of her parents’ RV on our mantel now — we bought the actual RV from her father at the wedding, and it sits in our driveway, forty seasons of pennants still on it.
The jersey that started it hangs by the door. Enemy colors.
We’re both wearing them home this year. Together. Her parents are bringing the mustard.
