This is an opinion column.

Birmingham has been burned. I get it. I do.

How many cut-rate football teams does one need, after all, before they all start feeling like spam in your inbox that promises riches and delivers … pain?

I get it.

I cheered through the WFL and the USFL, applauded through the WLAF and gave a little golf clap for the Canadian Football League. I wished the Arena Football League well and hoped briefly for the XFL. I look forward, again, to the Birmingham Iron and the Alliance of American Football, the latest incarnation of hope and madness to hit this insane town.

Because this time, I hope as I did with those other leagues, we’ll do that thing we do and get a different result.

Nuts, I know.

But this one has Trent Richardson! And this one has Blake Sims! And this one has another quarterback who taught himself the game on YouTube and had a whole bunch of 300 games in high school. As a bowler.

Lord, I’ve seen leagues with Johnny Musso and Larry Czonka, Birmingham teams with Joey Jones stretching parallel to the ground for an impossible catch. I’ve seen Joe Cribbs in a Birmingham Stallions uniform, and Chan Gailey coach the Fire. Birmingham learned Canadian rules, because football is worth it. Then it learned XFL rules, because the coin flip was a street fight.

You could measure the way Birmingham felt about itself by the way it packed the stands for its teams. This city really thought it was going to get an NFL team in the ‘70s, and it filled Legion Field for those WFL games to prove its worth.

It has always shown up for football – though the never-ending march of teams at times took its toll.

I really thought, when the Birmingham Americans won the World Football League title in 1974 when I was 11 years old, that they might be given a shot to play the Super Bowl champs to, you know, unify the title.

The city no longer harbors real NFL aspirations, and that’s OK. I’ve long since stopped daring to believe the latest league will compete for the American football attention span. I no longer hold on to the silly dreams of my childhood.

But none of that has anything to do with whether I’ll sit in a seat at old Legion Field to watch another league kick off in a couple of weeks. I will.

Because it’s not the disappointment of all those other ventures that I remember. I don’t dwell on creditors coming to locker rooms to repossess the uniforms.

What I remember is sitting in the stands through a monsoon with my father and 55,000 other hopelessly hopeful Birmingham fans, watching a Birmingham Americans field goal beat the Chicago Fire in a shootout that would make the modern day Big 12 proud. They played “The Night Chicago Died” on the P.A., and I thought of that game every time I’ve ever heard it.

I remember sitting with my dad, eating peanuts and marveling at the catches Jones made in warmups.

I remember, as dad grew older, sitting in the stands with him and with my own young children watching the Barracudas, seeing the team lose, trying to get our heads around three-down football and wondering out loud with others in the stands what in the world a Barracuda had to do with Birmingham.

I remember loving every minute of it, because it was football, and family, and Birmingham. Because it was pride in city and love for a game. And it was ours.

Birmingham has been burned. I get it. But I would do it all again. And again and again.

So thank you Birmingham Iron. May I have another?

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.