Vince invites me to a game with a group of his college friends. Once a year, they descend on the Coliseum, setting up camp at the tailgate and then watching the Raiders win, having chosen the game they think offers the best chance of victory. This year, 336 days after the Silver and Black’s last win, and five losses into the 2014 campaign, they have chosen the NFC West–leading Arizona Cardinals, who, as it turns out, are not very bad at all.

I’m told to bring beer.

It’s eight o’clock on a beautiful Sunday morning in Berkeley when a very blond, very attractive, stroller-pushing couple looks disdainfully at the 30-rack of Coors Light I’m bear-hugging as I hurry toward BART. A man with his daughter on his shoulders does a double take, stopping just short of covering her eyes. I begin to sweat. Finally, across the street from the station, I pass a bearded man who grins at me. There’s a pitbull sniffing at his feet as he lays out a piece of cardboard and takes a seat on the sidewalk. “Now there’s a party. Right on, bro-bro.” (When I return 10 hours later, he’s still sitting on his cardboard in the same spot, but, this time short a 30-rack, he does not acknowledge me.)

The train slowly fills with Raider fans, all of whom — judging by the massive, glittering tangles of beads hanging from their necks — seem to be returning from a specialty Raiders Mardi Gras. A man gets on a few stops after mine with a bottle of Cook’s. “Ready to celebrate,” I write in my notes.

The Coliseum, an enormous, ugly, all-concrete 1964 monstrosity no one likes, lies across a long footbridge from the Coliseum BART station. The footbridge itself — edged in barbed wire and suspended over parking lots, railroad tracks, and a brackish offshoot of the San Leandro Bay — runs parallel to the gleaming new BART station that links to Oakland International. The not-yet-operational line was still doing practice runs that day, drawing admiring coos from bead-laden onlookers.

As I cross — Coors Light box jabbing me in the leg but no longer drawing reproachful looks — I see a cloud of blue-gray smoke hanging over the parking lot: the tailgate. Vans, tents, beer, masks, silver and black everywhere. Fully one-third of stereos seem to be playing “Still D.R.E.” at any given time.

I’ve been promised chaos: cowering Arizona fans ringed by packs of slavering Raider Nationites with homemade weapons, huge men in silver body-slamming one another and burning effigies of Carson Palmer, former players, first grade teachers.

Here, a big discovery: Raider fans are, well … nice.

The atmosphere in the Coliseum parking lot the morning of the Raiders’ sixth loss of the season is carnivalesque. One section actually is a carnival, a fenced-off, family-friendly village of concession stands and raffle draws where you can rock climb or play cornhole with Raiderettes. People are chummy: fans greet each other as they pass; I’m offered food and beer by strangers repeatedly. There are, maybe, some impolitic outfits — a man in spikes strides by, a baby doll dressed in miniature Cardinals gear impaled on a pike in his hands — but for the most part, Raider Nation is downright neighborly.

I’ve dressed, cautiously, in a long-sleeve gray shirt and jeans. Most everyone I talk to eyes me at some point and asks if I support the Nation, a question to which, neighborly fixings aside, I suspect there is a wrong answer. These people also ask me, over and over, if I’m all alone out here? An usher seems assuaged when I point to the portion of the group I’m sitting with: three guys, every one of them over 6 feet tall, 200 pounds, and a former football player. “You’re with those guys?” she asks. “Good.”

Outside the stadium I chat with Frank, a season ticket holder set up under a tent, custom Raiders license plate — RAIDRS2 — hanging over his head. He tells me he’s been a fan since 1968, when the team went 12–2.

Image courtesy of Claire McNear

Frank wears his season pass around his neck, glasses and a Panama hat with Raiders brim giving him a grandfatherly look. His shorts reveal that one leg is replaced below the knee by a silver prosthetic. Frank thinks this’ll be the one to snap the Raiders out of their skid.

Frank is eager to impress upon me the safety of the Raiders experience: his ticket sales rep told him that the Oakland Coliseum is the fourth-safest stadium in the league. I do not mention the 40-foot-high watchtowers set up in the middle of either of the stadium’s parking lots, manned by Event Staff in yellow jackets who are probably not up there to look for people being overly friendly.

Frank worries a little about the state of Raider Nation. “We had a lot of fans. Then when we went to L.A.,” — in 1982; he pauses, sighs — “they became Niner fans.”

He grimaces. “A true Raider fan never leaves.”

Does Frank think I can become a true Raider fan? Sure! “You just gotta find a season ticket holder to sponsor you.” He suggests I come to another game with him, his family watching this exchange in silence. “Take a picture of me and the blond!” he tells a boy.

As I’m talking with a nearby band of tailgaters about the team — it’s one of their birthdays, “We’ll be celebrating the victory, too!” — a couple of women come up with clipboards, asking if we’d like to keep the Raiders in Oakland. They work for Coliseum City, they say, the enormous proposed sports and entertainment complex that is trying desperately to secure funding for a new stadium to convince the Raiders to stay in the Bay Area.

Therein, the rub: the Raiders may not be long for Oakland. The team’s lease at the Coliseum is up at the end of 2014. Coliseum City has struggled to cobble together financial backing, or even the committed support of the Raiders. Los Angeles, the team’s erstwhile home during a 12-year tiff with the City of Oakland over the state of the Coliseum, outdated even then, has been courting the Raiders anew. San Antonio sent an official delegation to meet with Raiders brass in November, and there are whispers that perhaps it will be the Raiders that are shipped off to be the NFL’s anchor team in London. In the stands, fans hold up signs: STAY IN OAKLAND.