There's nothing that makes you feel that old F. Scott's curse, that boats-borne-back-ceaselessly-against-the-current, west of the Mississippi, bass-ackward Minnesota Vikings pettiness, than your first trip to Lambeau Field. In some ways, even though there's no place in the world more Midwestern than Green Bay, and it's only five hours away by car from Minneapolis, you feel less significant and more alien here than you do on a trip to Manhattan. This is a place that should remind you of home — in Green Bay, everybody parks their cars on the lawns of little pea green ramblers for 15 bucks cash, exactly like when we park at the Minnesota State Fair — but the football is so much more real here. There are roots here, gridiron history that we just don't have back in Minnesota. You might have a couple vintage Polaroids of your dad's besnowmobilesuited trip to the old Met for a playoff game to see Fran Tarkenton and the Purple People Eaters back in the '70s, but when you're in Green Bay, snowmobilesuits and Bloomington and the '70s all seem like fads, long gone. The Packers have been playing in Green Bay since 1919 — and in the massive Lambeau Field Pro Shop, you can buy any of a variety of bourgie-as-fuck sweatshirts adorned with that date from "The Titletown Collection" by Lands' End. After inspecting enough of these garments, after seeing just how tasteful green and gold really is, you're sufficiently self-conscious about the color purple. It looks stupid. Back out in the atrium, you will notice the little pockets of Vikings fans interspersed throughout and you will begin to see that we're not even inspiring any animosity from these warm, goodhearted people. In fact, most Vikings fans you see are in singles or pairs tagging along in mixed company with other Packers fans, the idiot son or the strange nephew or the dopey boyfriend, trudging along, shoulders hunched over, sheepish, like he wore sweatpants to church and just realized everybody else looks nice.

As long as we're being honest with ourselves, maybe for the first time in our lives, it's not until you get to the ground zero of this so-called "Border Battle" that you realize quite what a little brother you are as a Vikings fan. We lost four Super Bowls in the 70s, but I've never even seen anything but four devastating NFC Championship Game losses in my lifetime. And the Vikings started out this season stronger than expected, but recently, our franchise quarterback, Christian Ponder, has regressed, and at 7-6 we're exactly who we thought we were: on the outside of the playoff picture looking in. But it wasn't until a visit to Lambeau's Packers Hall of Fame that it was brought home exactly how irrelevant, how ephemeral our little franchise is. After gasping at the sight of four Lombardi trophies in solemn glass cases in the sanctum sanctorum, two of them won by Lombardi himself, you walk out of the trophy room and into a room devoted to this season's Packer opponents. Beneath each enemy half-helmet there is a floor-to-ceiling plaque-scroll engraved with the historical results against the Packers. The Bears and the Vikings scrolls are right next to each other. We have three feet of blank space denoting the decades we awaited our first game against the Pack. The Bears have three feet of space where Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski were waging old-timey, double-time highlight-reel battles with Packer legends Johnny "Blood" McNally and Don Hutson. A tall, engraved roll call of tilts featured MDitka and Papa Bear Halas against Jim Taylor and Vince Lombardi, games that justified the epic poetry of John Facenda's baritone Homer. On this side of the Border Battle it's painfully obvious who the Packers consider to be their rival. All that hew and cry back home. Man, wandering around this place, it's embarrassing to think about.

So maybe the western Wisconsin Packers fans we have to deal with in the Twin Cities care about our little 50-year divisional rivalry, but when you see people standing next to the Curly Lambeau statue at the front gate with homemade signs proclaiming "BUCKET LIST ✔: FIRST GAME AT LAMBEAU!!!" you realize that you are at a holy site, this is a pilgrimage for these people. Packers fans coalescing from all corners of a vast diaspora, cheeseheads who have spent their whole lives waiting for one chance to be enfranchised by their heritage. These people have built a Yankee Stadium right here in dairy country. And Vikings fans? We're just another sacrificial lamb — we might as well be the Detroit Lions. Except the Lions have been the Packers' divisional rival since 1933.

I will say that when I was able to choke back the self-loathing by a couple of degrees, when I found the strength to tamp down the ill humor of my crazy jealousy of all this that belongs to them, I was able to appreciate the magic of the Lambeau time warp. There is no major sports stadium atmosphere in the world, maybe save Barcelona's Camp Nou, that feels so small-town, family-friendly, and rooted in noble football tradition while also somehow bizarrely cosmopolitan and open and confident in its place in the world. Granted, it's a lot more straight-up drunk than game night in Barcelona. And I know there are pathetic police reports filed every year here (this year's "man with purple sombrero flees assault scene"), but people could not be more butter-fed or welcoming. Even if you're obviously rooting for the opponent, Packers fans don't seem to really care. The "you just don't get it, do ya, you you silly goose!" Wisconsin twinkle is patronizing, obviously, but you can't help enjoying this. They are the cutest fan base on earth.

We found our seats 50 rows up in the south "Lambeau Leap" end zone (pro tip: Just go on Packers Fan Tours and buy your tickets there — really easy). There doesn't seem to be a bad seat in the place. It wasn't frozen tundra; more clammy 48 degree cold underneath gray skies that held fog for hundreds of miles on the way into town. They pack them in on old-school metal bleachers and it's cozy when you're folded into the full-on Oshkosh phonetic assault: FIRST AND TEN DO IT AGAIN GO PACK GO! The fighter jets had barely creased the sky when Aaron Rodgers had them up seven on a jump ball on which James Jones absolutely clowned one of our cornerbacks. They tacked on three shortly thereafter. But the next couple Packers drives stalled, and in the second quarter Adrian Peterson was starting to work up a lather. All Day is pretty much the Vikings' entire offense at this point, especially with Percy Harvin out, and, well, I guess we have big tight end Kyle Rudolph. Because Christian Ponder found Rudolph in the end zone to cap a long drive, and hey, we have a game in Lambeau. Somehow our defense got A.Rodge off the field on a third-and-short again. Then a handoff to AP on a play between the tackles. He's into the second level untouched. A Packer loses hold of his...