The snow day that started my fandom

There are memories that fade, and there are memories that calcify into personal mythology. Mine happened on a Friday in the winter of 1990, somewhere between a foot of Pacific Northwest slush and a fourth-quarter Portland Trail Blazers beatdown of the Boston Celtics.

I was a kid in Beaverton, which meant winter operated on a very specific, very fragile logic: the entire regional infrastructure could be brought to its knees by an amount of snow that a Minnesotan would call "Tuesday." 

On Thursday, February 15, 1990, the sky obliged. Portland recorded 2.3 inches of snow that day, which means I didn’t have to go to school on Friday.  I spent the day sledding down Danielle Rd in Beaverton with my buddies, the whole day looking forward to the Trail Blazers game that night.  There is something about Gen X snowdays that were extra Thunderdome.  I’m amazed I didn’t get concussed more, but I digress.

That night  the Trail Blazers hosted the Boston Celtics at Memorial Coliseum. This was back when home games were radio only, so I listened to the great Bill Schonely paint a picture with his words of that entire game on the basement stereo.  The Blazers won, 120–101.

This wasn't some nothing Celtics team, either. This was still Larry Bird's Boston, a franchise that had spent most of the decade treating the rest of the league like a rented Dodge Dart. Meanwhile this Blazers squad (Clyde, Terry, Buck, Duck, & Jerome) was the same Rip City machine that would go all the way to the Finals that spring. So when we beat them, that late in the season? That's the night it clicked for me that we might actually be good for a few years. That's my formative memory: the moment I'd point to and say, that's when I became a fan. Sure, I’d been happy they’d won games in the past.  That win gave me what I’d describe as joy. 

Thirty-plus years later, Beaverton still can't handle snow, the Celtics are still a measuring stick, and somewhere in me there's still a kid on a couch who thinks two inches of snow and a blowout over Boston is basically "best day ever" material. I'm grown now, a parent, apathetic about most things, but I still get up for Trail Blazers games with the same energy 8th grade me did. 

Cheers all, I hope your day is as awesome as you are. Can't wait to root for the same laundry with you.

Dave