Inside My Memorable Week As a Member of the Vikings’ Grounds Crew

One SI writer spent four days undercover, embedded with the team’s field staff and getting a crash course on everything from scrubbing out paint to manning the field goal nets.

Sports Illustrated

Sam Darnold takes a snap from the 47-yard line. He fakes a handoff and his feet glide across the Norseman logo in the center of the Minnesota Vikings’ home field. He can barely look for a place to throw before Indianapolis Colts tackle Grover Stewart swallows him up and jars the ball free, allowing cornerback Kenny Moore II to scoop up the ball with a clear path to the end zone.

Moore is standing 38 yards from the goal line, which means he’s about 60 yards away from me. I am on field level, along the back wall of the west end zone at U.S. Bank Stadium, when suddenly Moore is running right at me.

This is the moment I have been mentally preparing for all week.

After 10 years at Sports Illustrated, I’ve been given the chance to try a new job: a four-day, unpaid temp position as a member of the Vikings’ grounds crew. An immersive crash course in turf and paint and behind-the-scenes equipment.

After a scoreless first quarter, the Colts have just put six points on the board in about the most sudden way possible, and I am jolted into action as I hustle past the goalpost for one of the most exciting extra points of my life.

Matt Gay boots the ball cleanly through the uprights, and the pigskin tumbles end-over-end until its path stops abruptly when it encounters a net I have raised to stop it.

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Thursday

“We test the s--- out of the field,” Grant Davisson tells me. “We wanna give the players the best field possible, for practice and games.”

It’s Halloween morning, the Thursday of Week 9, and the first snow of the year is falling in Eagan, Minn., home of the Vikings’ team offices and practice facility. Yesterday, it was 70 degrees. Today, big flakes come down on the team’s five outdoor fields. With an indoor game next on the schedule, the team makes the sensible decision that practice will be held inside.

Grant, the team’s director of sports fields and grounds, is my boss for the week. He’s 6'2" and broad, with white in his beard and clear-rimmed glasses, giving off year-round-shorts-guy vibes. He’s been with the Vikings for 20 years.

We walk across the indoor practice field, hours before the players. Grant does that a lot. He prides himself on the practice field being as similar as possible to the gameday turf at U.S. Bank Stadium, important for both safety and performance. The Vikings’ layers underneath the turf go heavier on sand than most teams, Grant informs me. “We’re going for a stable surface that’s soft,” he says. These are organizational decisions, conversations with the team’s vice president of sports medicine. Grant and I are in sneakers, not cleats, but he tells me to pay attention to how easily my shoes are releasing from the turf as I raise them up with each step.

We hop in his Polaris Ranger UTV and he gives me a driving tour around the sprawling 185-acre property the Wilf family bought in 2016. Street signs in Vikings purple guide the way. Beyond the practice fields and team HQ, the property has residential space, a Vikings hall of fame and an Omni hotel. As the winter months approach, lakes will be transformed into ice rinks and curling sheets.

Grant takes me to his office—attached to a large storeroom that’s part garage, part workshop, with an array of vehicles parked inside. There’s a room where he and the rest of his grounds crew have desks, with windows overlooking the grass practice fields and the Vikings’ main office building beyond. Chip, Grant’s 10-year-old blue Weimaraner, who is officially listed as Turf Dog on the team’s website, has a bed under the window.

This smaller, more modest building was erected first, well before even the grass fields outside. Grant was part of the process as they selected sod in Colorado and trucked it across the country, carefully placing it over layers of gravel, pipes and sand to create the ideal playing surface.

He takes me to another back room with pipes and boilers, the infrastructure most people don’t think about when they see a football team line up on Sunday afternoon. Grant monitors a computer that measures the temperature of the practice fields down to the tenth of a degree.

“You have to do everything,” Grant says of his job. “You have to be mechanically sound and know how things work, because you’re gonna have to fix everything.” He grows tomatoes outside the maintenance building and installed bee boxes that now provide honey for the cafeteria. When Brad Childress was the team’s coach from 2006 to ’10, he’d have Grant hang the pictures in his office.

If the team was practicing outside, his crew would be tending to the precious grass. Mowing and blowing clippings off it, then keeping an eye on practice to fill in divots as needed. But the snow has given us a partially free afternoon, so we make the drive over to U.S. Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis. The state high school soccer tournament is taking place there at the moment, necessitating not just soccer goals on the turf but painted yellow goalie boxes and other lines that will be scrubbed out long before the country tunes in to see Grant’s field on Sunday Night Football.

We walk through the parts of the stadium most people never see. Jigsaw puzzle-shaped pieces of foam padding stacked under retractable bleachers. Closets with old goalpost pads and first-down markers. Boxes that say “Ref game pants” and “2020 towels.” Grant’s dog, Chip, is very well-behaved on the fields, but he stepped in some wet sealing in the stadium’s early days and left a footprint still visible outside the elevator from the player and staff parking lots to the field level.

Day 1 feels like my orientation, simply getting a lay of the land. Tomorrow, I’ll do some actual work.

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I am obsessed with the Vikings’ 25-yard lines. Yes, it’s true. I am admittedly prone to unusual obsessions, and for several years now these two particular stripes across this one particular football field have been on my list. They are the reason I’m here in Minnesota.

Several years ago, on a Sunday like any other, as NFL RedZone guided my attention from stadium to stadium, it occurred to me that the Vikings’ 25-yard lines were outlined in purple. Not the 20s, the 25s. Surely, I had noticed it before. But wait a second. Were they the only ones?

Several teams—the Colts, Arizona Cardinals, Buffalo Bills, Las Vegas Raiders and sometimes the Philadelphia Eagles—have a splash of color other than white or green painted down the 20-yard line, signaling entry into the all-important red zone. But the Vikings stood out as the one team that did things differently. I knew in that instant I had to talk to the person who gets to make that kind of decision. It led me to Grant and an origin story born out of convenience.

The Vikings spent the 2014 and ’15 seasons playing at TCF Bank Stadium (home of the Minnesota Golden Gophers) in between when the Metrodome was demolished and the team’s new palace was built on the same ground.

The 25-yard lines already had to be scrubbed (a term that just means removing paint) between games, so Grant’s team could add the NFL’s shield logos which must be on every game field. So, they figured, why scrub twice as many lines as needed? Why not just paint the 25s?

As it happened, the team’s special teams coaches and players liked having each half of the field perfectly bisected. The team decided to keep the aesthetic distinction as it moved into its new digs.

“It’s fun to have something unique,” Grant says. “Everyone kinda does. Some people have extra point lines that are really long. Or some people don’t have extra point lines. Some people still paint the X. Remember the X that used to be on the 30 or 35 for the kickoff? There’s some stadiums that still do an X.”

The Vikings’ move into U.S. Bank Stadium happened to coincide with the NFL’s 2016 rule change that brought touchbacks on kickoffs out to the 25 instead of the 20. While the definition of the red zone never changed, it was no longer congruent with the touchback line. As kickoffs became touchbacks with higher frequency, and touchbacks became snaps from the 25-yard line, the Vikings were the only team with a home stadium where the first snap of the game typically came with the ball placed on the ceremonially painted stripe.

Game after game across the NFL featured the first actual snap of action with the painted stripe not on the nose of the ball but five yards behind the center’s butt. Everywhere except Minnesota.

Grant and I spoke over the phone about all sorts of aesthetic decisions, such as the yardage numbers on his field being painted in the same font as the team’s uniform numbers, a trend he says they started and other teams quickly copied.

“You should come paint with us sometime,” Grant offered as we were about to hang up. What I did not know at the time was that Grant’s team does a lot more than paint.

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Goldich uses a scrubber on the Vikings’ turf practice field / Sports Illustrated

Friday

The paint on the field doesn’t dry, Grant explains. It cures. We’re at TCO Stadium, the outdoor turf field at the Vikings’ practice facility in Eagan. They are far from the only organization that gets use out of it.

The field has a seating capacity of 7,000, which makes it great for fans attending Vikings training camp, plus one or two high school football games a week. The field has also hosted Premier League Lacrosse, National Rugby League, the United Soccer League’s Minnesota Aurora, a CrossFit competition called the Granite Games and more. Grant’s team preps the field for all of it.

Today’s mission is to convert it from the high school football setup to the Vikings’ practice specifications. Most of the field markings are permanently in-laid. The purple end zones and the logo at midfield are simply the color of the turf when there’s no paint applied. The hash marks are not, and our first job is to scrub out the high school lines.

The scrubber is a glorious machine. It looks like a riding lawn mower, with tanks of water and chemicals. Three large circles of thick bristles can be lowered to the ground to do the actual scrubbing.

Scrubbing is a group effort, and Grant’s team has more continuity than most NFL rosters. The team moved to the Eagan facility in 2018, and his four main guys have all been there the whole time. They all have their own specialties, but also do a little of everything. The three scrubbing with me: Kyle Larson is a master of irrigation; Jared Kuhn is a mechanical whiz, who is deep into the hood of a machine when I first meet him; and Sao Sypaseuth tends to the grounds. Sao and Kyle also do gameday work for the Minnesota Twins.

Before I get in the driver’s seat, I take a turn on spray duty. Wearing a bulky backpack that makes me feel like a Ghostbuster, I pump a handle and then spray over the white lines, releasing a chemical that will activate the paint and allow it to be scrubbed out.

Finally, it’s my turn in the driver’s seat. The machine does not have pedals or a steering wheel; all mobility functions are managed using handles. I move my arms left and right, forward and back, getting used to propelling the brushes and the machine itself across the field.

I’m doing … O.K. We go in 10-yard increments. I patiently run over each line a few times back and forth and then on to the next one. It’s not as simple as driving straight ahead, because every five yards a horizontal hash mark is replaced by a vertical one along the inside edge of the column. After each 10 yards, I zoom backward, revealing what should be empty green turf, naked between the full lines every five yards. It is quite satisfying to see what I have made disappear.

In this moment, I am also extremely mindful that the Vikings, a team very much trying to win the actual Super Bowl, an organization that has sunk untold millions of dollars into having the most pristine and consistent surfaces of grass, slit film and monofilament, has allowed me—a generally arbitrary person who simply asked nicely—the chance to operate expensive machinery atop those same surfaces on which players such as Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and Harrison Smith will soon run and cut and plant and pivot and jump and land.

It’s fine, Vikings fans. I am heavily supervised.

By comparison, the groomer, my next toy, is much easier to operate. Grooming is like gently raking the field. Fans are familiar with in-fill, the black rubber pellets that splash into the air during slow-motion replays of wide receivers tapping their toes along the sideline. My scrubbing has created heavy trails of pellets that we will settle back into place.

Thankfully, the groomer has pedals and a steering wheel. Grant tells me to take it for a quick spin to get comfortable, so I floor it and joyride around the Norseman at the 50. I choose not to worry about what any of the staff in their offices might think if they happen to look out at what’s happening on their practice field below.

I line myself up to do three slow turns up and down the length of the field. Grant tells me to keep the machine at a steady walking pace for a nice, even groom. There is a long magnet across the back that sucks up debris from the field. It’ll catch screws dislodged from helmets, safety pins after cheerleading practices and, yes, they have found someone’s car keys back there. One time there was what’s known as the Nutter Butter Incident, which Grant does not want to be repeated.

I am getting comfortable with my litany of tasks. We have to swap out the high school-sized goalposts for NFL uprights, which is made easy by hand-cranking a hydraulic pump that tilts the goalposts down to field level. Pieces of posts unscrew and as a team, we hoist them up and slide them into place. I finish things off by Velcroing the heavy purple VIKINGS pad into place.

Finally, we mow. The Vikings have once again moved practice indoors. It was in the 30s this morning, and temperatures are now in the 40s, but chilly with the sun all but disappeared.

“Minnesota gets s--- for our weather, but we have good weather,” Grant says optimistically. “It just gets cold.” It’s good for your mind, he tells me. “We shouldn’t be under fluorescent lights all day. Humans weren’t designed for that.”

The Vikings’ four grass practice fields are arranged in two squares of two. They can repaint them to rotate the fields so they face north-south or east-west to help combat a crosswind.

I have never mowed a lawn in any fashion, I make clear to everyone entrusting me with what feels like the machine with which I can do the most permanent damage. They give me a pair of earplugs and pretty simple directions: Keep the mower moving when the blades are down and lift the blades before I reach the concrete beyond the back of the end zone.

I do three passes up and down in the narrow strip of grass between the fields. You know, the part where players don’t actually do anything important. I’m told to go ahead and mow a field, which I take as a sign that my trial was at least somewhere in the neighborhood of adequate.

Back and forth I go for about 40 minutes, up and down an entire practice field. Making stripes as I ride in opposing directions. Navigating turns around the goalposts. Doing my best to keep straight lines, though forming a few “banana hooks” in the grass, where I struggle to do so.

I think back to that conversation from a few years ago over the phone with Grant. He invited me to paint, but I’ve gotten a lot more than I bargained for.

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Davisson spends a lot of time walking the field and testing the playing surface / Sports Illustrated

Winter is coming. On Monday night in Week 15, the Vikings will debut their Winter Warrior uniforms. Since the league eased up rules on teams using secondary helmets during games, many have debuted black alternates and several others have gone white.

Next week, the Vikings will wear white jerseys and pants, with metallic gray accents, and white helmets for the first time in franchise history. Of course, the field will be painted to match the icy theme. Grant flips through a deck showing how the team intends to decorate the field every week of the season. This is all tediously planned out and approved by the league in advance.

They’ve painted the Norseman white and silver. One year he convinced the league to let him outline it pink during a breast cancer awareness campaign.

For the winter warrior game, they’ll go with white braids within purple end zones to match a design on the jerseys. Two years ago, they did mostly white end zones with a purple border and purple lettering. Last year’s whiteout game had purple end zones. “We wanted to try something different,” Grant says. “We like to play around with stuff. We’re Vikings, we’re innovators.”

Grant tells me about his white logos, so I ask about his white whale—the creative design he’d like to see on the field that he hasn’t done yet, and that’s an interesting story. There was one week when the team painted Viking ships in the end zone. The only problem is, it happened to be the busiest 10 days of his professional life. And no one saw the ships.

That was in December 2010, as the Vikings celebrated their 50th anniversary season. The ships were all set, there was just one problem: The Metrodome roof famously collapsed in a blizzard the day before a game. 

In need of a temporary home, the Vikings played against the New York Giants at Ford Field in Detroit. The team stencils and paint flew to Detroit, and the Lions’ crew applied their logos to the field.

Grant couldn’t make the trip, instead living at TCF Bank Stadium for a full week to prepare the outdoor field for a game the following week against the Chicago Bears. This was several years before the Vikings’ planned seasons at the Golden Gophers’ field—meaning it wasn’t outfitted with underground heat. They had to create a bubble over the field with tarps and heaters to raise the field temperature. Grant slept overnight inside the bubble, atop a pair of yoga mats stacked on the field. When the heaters would shut off in the middle of the night, the sudden drop in sound would wake him up so he could restart them. Grant knows his counterpart with every other team in the league. Ken Mrock from the Bears and Andre Bruce from the Kansas City Chiefs both came in to help.

This year’s game against the Bears should go more smoothly. 

Most people think of U.S. Bank Stadium as a football venue, but over the course of a year it hosts more college baseball games than anything else. Entire sections of bleachers can be moved to make room for the outfield. Sections of turf containing the Norseman and the end zones can be removed instead of painted over all offseason.

A team led by facilities operations manager Troy St. John converts the stadium for everything from Monster Jam to SummerSlam. Troy and Grant laugh about the fact that the very first event in the stadium was a 2016 soccer match between Chelsea FC and AC Milan, for which they put in grass. Great turf field, now put sod over it.

At the time, Troy worked as a field installer, traveling frequently to help lay down playing surfaces around the country. That included plenty of work with the Vikings, before he was hired to manage the team’s home stadium.

They have both seen plenty, but I have caught them on a pretty typical week. 

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The hashmarks inside the midfield logo are among the tiniest details on the field to paint / Sports Illustrated

Saturday

At 9:10 a.m., Grant bends down and picks up a stray button that has somehow traveled through this expansive universe and ended its journey on the 10-yard line at U.S. Bank Stadium. It’s 35 hours to game time, and every inch of this turf will be properly inspected between now and then.

This feels like the day I have come here for. It’s the day I get to paint the field. That means it’s time to meet Wayne Enger. He’s been painting here since 1989 and has the full rainbow splattered all over his boots to seemingly prove it. He started at the Metrodome, where he painted for both the Vikings and Twins, until Minnesota’s MLB team moved into Target Field in 2009. Grant says he also makes a mean margarita. When the staff used to play softball together, they would pregame at Wayne’s house.

The yellow soccer lines have vanished. It feels like the stadium has people here around the clock, and when I arrive Saturday morning the field has been properly scrubbed and groomed—of course, not for the last time before kickoff.

Wayne, 61, is on a crew of about 12 that works 40 hours a week at the stadium, year-round. He got here at 4:30 a.m. There actually isn’t anywhere near as much to paint as there used to be. The Vikings installed a new turf field this offseason, which has much more in-lay. If I had come last year, I could have helped paint the thin purple trim around the yard-line numbers and the purple along my beloved 25-yard lines. Now those are permanently etched into the turf. All Wayne has to paint is whatever special detail the team wants to change up, plus the proper NFL “initiative” for that week—NFL-sanctioned wordmarks such as “Crucial Catch” or “Salute to Service” and the words along the back of the end zone.

This is the final week before the presidential election, so one end zone will say VOTE. The other will say IT TAKES ALL OF US, a social justice message the league has used on the field since 2020.

Wayne is happy to show me his gadgets. He has a contraption with a bucket of paint on a wheeled cart, attached to a long hose and a nozzle that sprays a line about three or four inches wide, depending how far you hold it from the ground. He has hand rollers and thinner nozzles for details, and one that can paint up to two feet wide if he has to paint an entire end zone.

The wordmarks are not particularly challenging, and he has already created a partial outline of each letter, using stencils provided by the league that place semicircles along various edges and corners. His steady hand creates the sharp edges as he gives me a tutorial. At first, he handles the outlines and lets me fill in the insides. He tells me to take my time, but not go so slowly that the paint globs up. Just do two or three quick passes and I should be able to fill in each little section of a V or an E. Wayne Picassos the curvy letters himself to start.

I think I’m ready, I finally tell him. I’d like to try a whole letter on my own, including the sharp outline that all the world will see on TV. He gives me the first L in the word ALL. I go outside the lines a bit and he rubs out the edge with his shoe before it sets. That’s all right, he tells me. It happens. But it’s hard not to feel like I’ve choked. Like I’ve let down Wayne and John Randle and Fran Tarkenton. Look at this faint green smudge in the white behind the end zone. Still, I would later ask another member of the staff if they could tell which L I painted, and it took them a while to get it.

There is one last detail to finish up, and it’s perhaps the smallest on the whole field. The league requires faint hash marks inside the Norseman logo at midfield so that if the referees have to spot the ball, they can see, for example, the 48-yard line. The Vikings have experimented with different colors: white, gray, black. Earlier today, Wayne painted them in black, but Grant doesn’t like how the black looks where parts of the logo itself are black. He wants the parts of the black hash marks that go over the black logo to be in gray. Troy is using a stencil that looks like the hurdle a sprinter would leap over that leaves a little box the size of one NFL hash mark.

I join him at midfield when he has exactly one left, so it’s all mine. On the 49-yard line, to the left of the 50 and at the bottom of the face. I dip a metal tool in a bucket of gray paint and dab it along the edge of a stencil. We tear away the stencil the way you pull off a cake mold and it reveals what I think you could objectively call a good hash mark.

Grant and I walk the field. He quizzes me to see if I’ve picked up on some of the finer points. Like, for example, that the Norseman logo is not actually centered on the 50-yard line. It is shifted one yard over so the braid of hair that comes down is on the 50. That looks nicer. It required league approval, which was granted.

The final job of the day is maybe the most important. The team is required to test the field, which they do with two tools. One sticks metal grooves into the ground and measures the depth of the infill. Another drops a weight down a tube to measure the compaction, or firmness of the ground.

“There’s a lot of belief out there that turf is no work,” Troy says. “But it’s just as important to do these things. They’re not no maintenance, they’re not even low maintenance. They take work.”

The team is also required to test the practice field throughout the week, and send all the data on both fields to the league. They test 60 spots on the field, some that are done regularly and others selected at random. Grant, Troy and Dan Sidle, another member of the Vikings’ grounds crew, make their way around the field, administering tests while Grant makes notes. Earlier in the week, he showed me how his computer summarizes the data into grids and heat maps over illustrations of the field.

The field is actually quite crowded. The stadium is full of workers wiping seats and glass plates between sections. A crew is tinkering with the Skycam that hangs from cables attached to the ceiling and will give NBC an aerial view of the field. Fans are taking tours and trampling all over the field, running routes into the end zone and leaving sneaker footprints of in-fill pellets. Some are kicking field goals dangerously close to still-wet paint.

Between now and game time, the team will do more rounds of grooming, they’ll spray the field with water to settle the in-fill and drag a cocoa mat that raises the turf fibers. All this will make the color of the in-lay graphics pop, and make the field safe and consistent. It’ll look beautiful by gametime.

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Goldich gets a lesson in painting the wordmarks in the end zone / Sports Illustrated

SUNDAY

There are several rules every journalist knows, and I’m about to break a big one. You don’t wear gear repping the team you’re covering. But earlier in the week, Grant told me they’d get me a Vikings sweatshirt for the game, and it felt wrong to protest. I’m here to be part of the team, I thought. If that’s what everyone wears, I guess what’s the harm?

The team has procured me a light blue armband that grants me access to the field level during the game. If my job is to blend in and look like everyone else, I think the move is to slip my armband over my black Vikings sweatshirt. It feels like I’m going undercover.

My job Sunday is to man the kicking nets, but the most important piece of advice I’m given is not to get hit by a ball. Grant once got drilled by Denver Broncos running back Mike Anderson. He spiked the ball and it bounced up into Grant’s ribs, leaving bruises that lasted six weeks. If a ball comes near me, I am instructed not to be a hero. Duck and don’t worry about how silly you look on TV.

Compared to the previous two days, Sunday will be easy. The crew arrives five hours before the game to set up the sidelines. I assist in rolling a huge fan full of water that will send out misty air in the bench area. We move some other equipment and then we are mostly done. We sit in a supply closet and huddle around a TV showing the early games. One of the other fields looks beat up. You can tell they had a concert and didn’t do a good job fixing it before kickoff. These are the things you learn watching games with a grounds crew.

The nets are not difficult to operate. You simply pull down one wire on a pulley system until a carabiner is in position to clip into place. To lower the net, you unclip and just slowly, hand-over-hand, guide it back into position. Look at your partner across from you and try to go at the same speed. When the net is down, kick it close to the base of the wall so no one trips over it. A much easier learning curve than the scrubber.

It’s also a two-man job, and they’re letting me squeeze in like a three-man announcer booth. I’m told I’ll be stationed in the west end zone with Jared and Sao. 

During pregame warmups, I watch the kickers on both sides boot balls into the nets from the midfield logo. As game time nears, the stadium goes dark. Lights flicker and music blares as a marching band takes the field. The kickers send balls hurtling through relative darkness. I watch the paths of the balls as they travel from the top of the net back down to earth. 

Right before kickoff, Jared and Sao lower the nets. There are no more rehearsals; the next time they go up will be the real thing. They are both remarkably calm, even after that 38-yard fumble return that made the game’s surprising first score. After a long play, the team will celebrate for a bit, Sao says. Plus, every scoring play gets reviewed. The only time I’d really have to scramble is for a quick field goal with a running clock. It only takes about 10 seconds to fully raise them.

Most of the game is easy. Just three hours with one of the best views in the house. Trevor and Sao have been paired up at this end zone for as long as they’ve been doing this, with Kyle and Dan on the other side. On a piece of paper hanging up in the office back in Eagan, they track which pair has had to raise more nets over the course of the season.

They’ve had unobstructed views of some great moments in Vikings history from this very spot. Jared says they had an amazing angle of the Minneapolis Miracle as the play developed, before Stefon Diggs ran it into the end zone on the other side of the field.

At one point a fan in the front row leans over and asks Jared how to get his job. “Well, I went to school for turf management,” Jared tells him. “And we work at the practice facility.” That ends that.

Every year at the Super Bowl, the league asks crew workers around the league who’s interested in preparing for the big game. Jared went to Miami for Super Bowl LIV, helping tend to the practice fields and painting a football field onto a parking lot to aid preparations for the JLo and Shakira halftime show. 

The game goes back and forth, and we hit our rhythm. Walk over to the end of the net. Pull down, clip in, hold the net away from the wall to protect the fans in the front row, unclip, lower, kick into the base of the wall. A nice easy routine as the Vikings build a second-half lead.

The Colts have the ball, coming our direction, trailing 21–10 with 2:05 to go.

“We should be ready here,” I announce to the group. When a team is down by nine, 10 or 11 late—needing two scores and an onside kick—the coach will often call for the field goal as soon as the team gets into range.

And on a first-and-10 from the Vikings’ 36, that’s exactly what the Colts do. Sao sees it first. “They’re bringing in the K-ball!” he calls out, referencing the special balls used on kicking plays, and we hustle over to raise the nets. No sweat for me, an experienced veteran of nearly a dozen net raises by this point. And we have the net in place before Gay makes the score 21–13.

“You were all over that one,” Sao says, and I am admittedly pleased with myself to have envisioned exactly how this game is ending. I actually feel a bit more like I’m part of the team. Like after four days of asking a million questions and being babysat as I try out their equipment, for the first time perhaps I have contributed in some small way.

A failed onside kick and a kneeldown officially puts the game in the win column for the Vikings … for, goodness … my Vikings? I am wearing the sweatshirt, after all. But after we wrap up thick cords attached to heavy fans and lug some more equipment from the sidelines back into storage, the limits of my belonging once again become apparent.

There are no victory Mondays for the guys who must prepare the fields for another week of practice. We have packed up and it is now almost 11 p.m. local time.

“8 a.m. tomorrow,” Grant tells them.

“Well, it was fun being part of this for a few days,” I say, as I remove my blue armband and return to my regular life.