Shortly before he began his first season coaching the Detroit Lions, in 2021, Dan Campbell gave one of the great run-through-a-brick-wall quotes in football history. Usually, NFL coaches talk about their jobs a certain way. They praise the team’s owner and organizational culture. They talk about how, so far, the city has been just so darn welcoming. They explain their plans for the future. Campbell, though, took a different route.

The new hire sounded more like a college coach who understood that to get the fanbase (and thus the donors) on his side, he needed to speak to something bigger. Campbell told football writer Kevin Clark about how the housing bubble and auto industry’s struggles took a toll on Michigan. “It hit everywhere, but it hit here,” Campbell said. Then he acknowledged something else to the reporter: that the Lions, who were always awful, had not exactly become a source of upliftment for a region that could use it. “The Lions have sucked for 30 years, and they’re always the joke. ‘Oh, the Lions’ and this narrative. I just feel like this place fit me, man. It really did. Like I belonged. That I literally fit like a glove in Detroit. They love the Lions, they love football, and this place called out to me. It was like, ‘You know what? You need to let these guys know what you’re about, that you understand their own pain.’ ” The baggage of losing wasn’t Campbell’s, but he picked it up. He mused about what it would be like to win in this place, specifically. “God, if you could ever win in Detroit?”

The Lions are now winning in Detroit—literally. Sunday’s triumph over the Los Angeles Rams was the franchise’s first playoff win in 32 years. They will get a chance to add a second in the Divisional Round against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this Sunday. Two more wins, and they’ll play for a Super Bowl. Let’s hope they get there!

As they proceed through the NFL playoffs, the Lions should be America’s team. The reason is not that Campbell is a good talker or even that Detroit has been through a lot. The reason to root for the Lions to beat everyone is that the people who love the Lions are going totally apeshit as their team mounts a charge that forever seemed impossible. It’s just fun to watch people have fun. As an added bonus, the Lions have found success in ways that seem designed in a lab to be a tonic for their fans’ past pain.

No sports franchise has facilitated a more toxic relationship with its fans than the Lions have over the past 30 or so years. Arguably it goes back further; Detroit has never won a Super Bowl, and the team’s cascading sadness really began with five straight first-round playoff losses in the ’90s—before things got even grimmer, and the playoffs themselves became unattainable. The Lions missed the tournament 11 years in a row at one point and were working on a six-year streak of not making it before this year’s team put a stop to the drought.

It wasn’t just the losing but the vile manner of it. In this run of futility, the Lions were blessed with arguably the most talented running back and the most talented wide receiver in football history. Barry Sanders retired from football in 1999 in large part, many believe and he has never denied, because being a Lion sapped his enthusiasm for the game. Calvin Johnson retired in 2015 under similar circumstances, with years of what would’ve been elite play still in front of him. The team got into financial disputes with both of those legendary players after they left, alienating them along with the team’s fans. Both players stayed away from the franchise for extended periods afterward before apparently mending fences and reappearing in the past few years. In a toned-down version of the same story, the Lions had one of the NFL’s best young quarterbacks, Matthew Stafford, taking hits and losing games throughout the 2010s. They traded him to the Los Angeles Rams, where he won a Super Bowl in his first year. Being gone from the Lions must have been a joy, like a touchdown-throwing peacock finally getting to roam free after years in a cage.

Alex Kirshner

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All of this became exhausting for fans, though not so exhausting that they could ever quit the team. A dear friend recently described his Lions fandom as a loop: “I have hope. They let me down. I never leave them.” That sounds like a healthy relationship, I told him, and he shot back, “It’s a trauma-based partnership.”

The 2023 season has been a nice salve, though. The Lions will never get another Sanders or Johnson, but they do have some of the best running backs and receivers in the NFL. Rookie tailback Jahmyr Gibbs has been a revelation as a runner and pass-catcher, sticking it to certain dorks who thought it was bizarre roster management when the Lions expended a first-round pick on him in April. Receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown made the All-Pro team. The Lions are getting a taste of what happens when you have megatalented skill players and do not waste them and drive them away from the sport they love.

These Lions are also deeply Michigan. Jared Goff, the quarterback who came the other way when the Lions traded Stafford, has written a nice second chapter for himself since arriving from Los Angeles. He speaks the local language well enough to soundtrack a game picture to Eminem’s “Welcome 2 Detroit” on Instagram. (Marshall Mathers wants to play football for Dan Campbell, by the way.) The team has four Michigan Wolverines on the roster, including star pass-rusher Aidan Hutchinson. With Michigan days removed from winning a national title, these are banner days for hundreds of thousands, or more probably millions, of crossover fans between the two teams. Ford Field, the team’s stadium, looked like a madhouse last weekend and undoubtedly will be one again this Sunday. Sports fans can’t fake the sensation of being good for the first time in a long time, and those who love the Lions have uncorked a lot of late.

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All of that Michiganosity notwithstanding, the Lions are not a perfect allegory for their hometown. A scion of the Ford dynasty owns the team. She was doing fine even when the region wasn’t. The team has plenty of autoworkers among its fans but also a bunch of lawyers and consultants and midlevel managers at insurance companies. The Lions’ revival this fall was not the driving force behind the United Auto Workers getting a good union contract. (Well, probably not. It is completely possible that some Ford exec was in a slightly better mood at the bargaining table on some Monday morning because of a Lions win the day before. Maybe the workers really did get a more generous offer out of it. You can’t prove it didn’t happen.)

But as convenient narratives go, this one is pretty good. The Lions did indeed suck epically as Detroit went through the worst of the financial crisis, as well as at numerous other moments. And now they do not suck, and the coach who un-sucked them has an acute understanding of what that means to people who can really use the emotional bounce that can come with a great football team making a run. The Lions’ run isn’t over, and until it is, their games will be an occasion to watch what happens when legions of people make an irrational decision to care about something and have it pay off just for a moment. That victorious senselessness is as much the American dream as anything Detroit has ever produced.