Since moving to Boston in 2002, I have noticed a rift between sports fans, and, frankly, rifts make me nervous. This particular division of the wide world of sports revolves around team loyalty.  

On one side you have the regional loyalists, people who grew up in or around major cities and have been following the same set of two, three or four teams by birthright.  

On the other, you have the nomads, people from states such as South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, Arkansas, Delaware and the ilk where no professional teams exist, leaving people to pick and choose their favorites at will. Also included in this group are the exiles from the first category, people who, for example, grew up in Cleveland but for whatever reason chose to root for the Bengals. (Whatever being the key word in that description, as, no matter how good your reason for eschewing the home team, the loyalists will not care and brand you a bandwagon jumper. Never mind the fact that until this year the Bengals were as equally hapless as the Browns for the past decade. It doesn't matter; the loyalists are a vicious bunch. But don't worry, we yokels are mighty kind and accommodating.) 

I hail from a tiny town just north of the "Largest Non-Desert Sand Formation" in the Western Hemisphere (aside: that would be the Nebraska Sandhills and I'm not exactly sure who they beat out for that distinction, but I imagine the competition wasn't stiff. Anyway, I digress). Growing up in the Cornhusker state there was only one team, the University of Nebraska football team. We had no representation in any of the professional leagues, leaving wayward youngsters to essentially pick who they wanted to follow at will. 

If you count yourself among the loyalist group, this brazen disregard for regional ties probably sounds sacrilegious and lawless. But take a second to imagine a world where fans could taunt each other endlessly. Every Sunday brought a new opportunity to tell your best friend how Dan Marino would never win a Super Bowl or needle your teacher about Leon Lett. If we hadn't been too young to curse mercilessly, drink whiskey and tote guns, I imagine it would've looked a lot like a scene from Deadwood. Every man for himself. 

In my immediate circle of friends, I can remember fans of the Giants, Cowboys, Packers, Dolphins, Raiders, Bengals, Broncos, Oilers, Vikings and Bears, as evidenced by the logos on the back of their Starter jackets and the names they shaved into their hair when that was all the rage. (Where have you gone Anthony "Mase" Mason?!) That's over one-third of the NFL alone in my little burg, and I'm sure it was much the same in the Dakotas and Carolinas of the world. 

Sure we missed out on the bonding nature of sports, we didn't bleed for the Red Sox like New England did, but we made up for it with the freedom to get behind whoever we wanted. 

By my count, I am attached to no fewer than seven teams at present. I bleed for three: the Cubs, the Creighton basketball team and the Cornhusker football team. These are the teams who I follow in the off-season, keep the schedules in my wallet and throw embarrassing tantrums when they lose. Beyond that, I also count myself as a supporter of the Bears in the NFL, the Bulls and Celtics in the NBA and the Red Sox in the Majors. These teams I passively follow, I check scores nightly, read an article occasionally if it's got a real snazzy headline, but if they ever came up against one of the bleeders there's no question where my allegiances lie. (The best example of this would be the yearly series between the basketball teams of Creighton and Nebraska, which I'll get to in a minute.) 

Bill Simmons, hailing from Boston, perhaps the loyalist capital of the United States, has written at length about his disdain for bandwagon jumpers and folks who fail to fall in line and root, root, root for the home team, so let me take some time, for him and the rest of you loyalists, to explain how I got to where I am today. Keep in mind, we're talking no regional ties here outside of the Cornhuskers. Now, there are pockets of Nebraskans in the southern corners of the states that gravitate towards the Denver and Kansas City teams. But where I lived, until the Rockies came to Denver, we still received Kansas City Royals broadcasts! We were over 600 miles from KC, a lot of space to dissolve any feelings of the home town team. 

I, like the loyalists, was born a Cornhusker fan. My blood is red. They were the only game in town. However, I'm ashamed to admit that at the height of the Huskers power, I became somewhat bored with winning all the time. Bill Callahan has given me all the reason I need to feel entirely guilty about that episode, but I'd be lying if I said some of my Nebraska fervency hasn't been revived due to the fact that we now have something to prove. (Also, moving to Boston and wanting a little of that loyalist Kool-Aid for myself helped as well.) 

After high school, I attended Creighton University, the other school in Nebraska that plays D1 sports, and developed an affinity for Bluejay basketball. Because Creighton is constantly playing the respect card, it was easy to abandon Husker basketball and baseball, and nothing has delighted me more than the Bluejays' dominance of the basketball series in the Dana Altman era. Luckily, Creighton doesn't have a football team, so there's no conflict of interest. I can still have the Huskers, but for those of you in Kansas who pulled for the Wildcat football team and the Jayhawk basketball team in recent years, that is unacceptable by anyone's standards. 

Finally, on to the pros. I don't remember the day very well, and I wish I did due to the pain it has caused me, but one afternoon my father and I were watching the Cubs on WGN. My father's not a Cubs fan, he's more a fan of the game than a team which also explains some of my more nomadic qualities, but I remember watching Andre Dawson, with his scowl and the severely closed stance, thump a home run and for whatever reason I was hooked. I declared there and then that the Cubs were my favorite team. Few decisions in my life have been more debilitating. 

That one choice, a common one in the Midwest and across the US due to the infectious reach of WGN and basic cable, lead me to adopt the Second City as my homebase for rooting interests and brings me to the second tier of teams I follow: 

Bears: Once I decided that I was going to act like a transplanted Chicagoan, there was only once choice for my team in the NFL, but it was pretty easy considering the Bears were dominant at the time behind Payton, Singletary and Dent. I even wore Walter's jersey to my first day of kindergarten. But the reason they're not in the first category is, for some reason, the NFL hasn't enraptured me like the rest of the country. If this were the UK edition of my blog, a) there would be a lot more nudity, b) there would be a lot more of the letter "u" in needless places, and c) I would be the one geezer in Manchester who likes cricket more than "football." 

Bulls: There was a time when this team was definitely in the first category and it was all due to Jordan. Like 99% of the Bulls fans you meet, you can trace it all back to MJ, but I followed those teams like no other. I'm not saying my parents had illegal satellite television coming into our home or anything, but we definitely got every regional SportsChannel broadcast, and when I was nearing 10, it wasn't uncommon for me to watch 70 of the Bulls 82 regular season games and all of the play-offs. I still have the majority of their title runs on VHS cassette. 

Celtics: In the 80's there were almost as many Celtics fans where I lived as Cornhusker fans. Boston was a blue-collar team, the antithesis of Riley's Lakers, just the sort of team humble farmers could get behind. I was in the other camp, with the flash and slash of Jordan, until I read Drive. After that I respected everything Larry Bird did, the bad news was that it was circa 1990, when the Hick sprawled out on the sidelines with ice on his back every minute he wasn't in the game. 

Red Sox: THIS DID NOT HAPPEN WHEN I MOVED TO BOSTON! The impetus for this column came about when I noticed the disdain hardcore chowderheads had for the influx of noveau-rouge, namely the thousands of college students who invade their town every year, buy new Sox hats and act like they know who Bucky Dent is. No, I became a Sox follower due simply to time zones. When Cubs day games were ending, Sox's night games were quick to follow on NESN. Mike Greenwell was my guy, and up until 2004 rooting for the Sox and Cubs was like pulling for the same team. But I still maintain that if it had come down to it in 2003, I may have died that year in the Bean because I was with the Cubbies all the way. The Cubs and Sox elimination that year on subsequent days was one of the worst 48-hour periods ever. Nevertheless, I'll never forget being in Boston when the BoSox finally won it all. 

Which brings me to now. I'm not trying to proclaim one rooting lifestyle over the other, just asking for a little understanding. I think deep down every sports nomad longs for a little loyalist blood, but ask kids in Houston if they wouldn't rather have the option of rooting for the Cowboys right now. 

If you meet someone who claims to follow the Kentucky Wildcats in basketball, the Pacers, the Reds and the Rams, it doesn't mean he or she is an atheist or front-runner, it just means that he or she is from Kentucky. 

I'm interested to hear others stories of how they got to where they are on the sports landscape, so let the comments flow.