I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan. This fact will invariably come up in conversation within a half-hour of our meeting. My life story usually unfolds in this order: I’m a New Yorker, I don’t own an iPhone — by choice — and my lifelong allegiance to a snakebitten N.F.L. franchise that plays its home games 1,020 miles away from my Greenwich Village apartment imbued in me an existential crisis long before I could correctly spell either word.

And yet if you ask me why I chose the Vikings, I will tell you that I have no idea, nor recollection of ever not rooting for them. My first memory? Bud Grant, the Hall of Fame coach, standing stoicly on the sideline, with his arms folded. Ask my mother.

I know I’m not alone. Other men and women who grew up in the Northeast in the early ’70s inexplicably adopted Alan Page, Chuck Foreman, Paul Krause and, of course, Fran Tarkenton as their football family despite having better local options. Many of us have no earthly connection to the Twin Cities, no coherent reason to point to the team that, at the time, was regularly losing Super Bowls and proclaim, “Those are my boys.” And yet, there was a fateful moment in our childhoods when we rolled the dice. And lost.

But I guess those are separate issues: why does someone become a fan of a random team? That’s easy. The uniform color or maybe a superstar player. Those fans generally grow out of it; and when old photographs of them wearing the team’s pompom hat appear, they laugh it off.