Jablonski: Raising a Bengals fan in an era of hope

Yes, I’m raising a Bengals fan — one of my many questionable parenting decisions. We wore Bengals jerseys on Halloween — I went as Andy Dalton, him as A.J. Green — because the Joe Burrow and Chase jerseys aren’t available yet at Goodwill, where my wife Barbara does all the clothes shopping. I got Chase to take a break from playing with his trains to watch the last play against the Raiders and he screamed in celebration not because he knows what an interception is but because everyone else in the room was so excited. His favorite color might be orange, though he said Tuesday it was yellow. Who knows what’s going on in that brain most of the day.

Of course, Chase may turn out to not care about sports at all. That’s a roll of the dice. He may even choose to root for the Cleveland Browns one day. That’s OK, too. He can move north to live with his uncle Noah in Painesville and grow up wearing a different shade of orange.

My dad Jeff grew up a Browns fan because he was born in Berea but switched to the Bengals because we lived east of Cincinnati in Mount Orab. That tells me he was never a real Browns fan. I would have a harder time making that switch. My orange blood runs deep.

While I have Reds memories going back as far as Pete Rose’s record-breaking hit in 1985 when I was 8, I don’t remember watching or caring about the Bengals until 1988, the last time they won two playoff games in a row — until now.

I’m fortunate to have that experience. A large percentage of the fan base wasn’t alive or was too young to remember when the Bengals beat the Bills in the AFC championship game that season. If you were born on Jan. 8, 1989, you turned 33 a few weeks ago. All you have known is playoff disappointment — until now.

Even though I recall the playoff success of the 1988 season, I also have burned into my brain the most bitter Bengals memory: the Joe Montana touchdown pass to John Taylor in Super Bowl XXIII. I was in sixth grade. One of my teachers, Tom Whyte, was a Browns fans. I remember him going back and forth with the young Bengals fans, neither side realizing how miserable the upcoming decades would be for all.

Losing the Super Bowl hurt. The Reds eased the pain by winning the World Series two years later. Then the dark ages began. The Bengals won a total of 14 games during my four years at Fayetteville High School. While the Reds had success here and there in the 1990s, enough to keep my interest, the Bengals became a non-factor in my life for a long time with a few exceptions.

• In 1990, Bengals running back Ickey Woods worked at a Jeff Wyler dealership in Milford in the offseason and sold our family a van. He signed the inside door, and it remained there for years before fading away.

• The Bengals also faded away. I don’t remember watching a single Bengals game during my four years at Ohio University, but not long after graduation, in 2000, as the fan frustration grew, I remember buying my dad a SaveTheBengals.com T-shirt. A fan started that website to pressure Mike Brown to step aside and hire someone from outside the organization to run the team.

The site still exists, sort of. It has only one page and features a definition of the word “hopeless” and how the Bengals define the adjective: “providing no hope; beyond optimism or hope; desperate: a hopeless case of being a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals.”

• On Sept. 23, 2001, on the first weekend of NFL games after the attacks of Sept. 11, I remember tailgating under old Riverfront Coliseum before a Ravens game. The Bengals won six games that year and might as well have raised a banner after not topping four wins in the previous three seasons.

• A season later, on Sept. 8, 2002, a day the temperature hit 95 at Paul Brown Stadium, I attended the season opener with my friend Billy. The Bengals, who would win two games that season, lost 34-6 to the Chargers.

“It could have been worse - this public execution could have been televised,” Dave Lance wrote in the Dayton Daily News .”As it was, Cincinnati Bengals fans should consider themselves lucky Sunday’s season opener at Paul Brown Stadium wasn’t sold out by last Thursday, thus causing the local television blackout.”

That season really marked the end of the worst times for the Bengals. The arrival of Marvin Lewis in 2003 changed everything. Two 8-8 seasons were in some ways as exciting as this one, and they set the stage for a return to the playoffs in 2005. At that point, the narrative changed, and Bengals fans started suffering not because their team was the worst team in the NFL but because their team was the worst in the playoffs or the unluckiest as was the case with the Carson Palmer injury that season.

Of course, by 2018, when Chase was born, the Bengals were slipping back toward the bottom, and that led to the departure of Lewis, the hiring of Zac Taylor and the best-timed two-win season in franchise history.

Chase will grow up in the Joe Burrow era because the Bengals had the No. 1 pick in 2020. Now my son is on a path similar to mine. I was 4½ when the Bengals lost to the 49ers in Super Bowl XVI. Chase turns 3½ on Feb. 3, 10 days before Super Bowl LVI.

I don’t know if the Bengals will get there. I don’t know if they will win if they do. I just know we’ll be shouting “Who dey!”