Anyone who has had any interaction with an American male knows that it's football season. There's no escaping it... fifty year old men wearing jerseys to the grocery store is a pretty good indicator – and even the internet is swamped with “fantasy” football sites. The NFL has clearly supplanted baseball as our nation's favorite sport (well, except when the Sox take on the Yanks) and only NASCAR can match the inexplicable devotion shown to total strangers every Sunday.

I have to admit that I am not immune from this strange affliction. Since I was a very young boy, I’ve been a Miami Dolphins fan. It may seem odd for a kid growing up in New England to root for a team that’s 1,200 miles away, but when you’re seven or eight years old you don’t need to justify such decisions – you just follow your heart. As best I can remember, I chose my favorite team because of a gimmick that would never be allowed in this day and age.

You see, back in the 1970s the Dolphins played in Orange Bowl Stadium and featured a live mascot. Yes, you read that right – a live mascot. There was a swimming pool located behind the goal posts at one end of the stadium with a real live dolphin swimming around. When a field goal or extra point was kicked, the ball would go into the pool and the dolphin would swim over to it and flip the ball out. Naturally, I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. It never occurred to me that the pool was way too small for that dolphin, or how they transported him to every home game from the Miami Seaquarium or whatever Sea World-type facility at which he normally lived.

For this blog entry, I tried to find a reference to all this and came up empty. Oddly enough, the Dolphins official history makes no mention of it at all. A google search did yield numerous references to the Jim Carrey movie Ace Venture: Pet Detective. I’ve never seen the movie and have no real desire to, but I am curious as to how the movie depicts the mascot's role with the team.

In recent years my devotion to the Dolphins has waned a bit. It just hasn’t been the same since Dan Marino retired. They’re just not that fun to watch so it’s been easier to resist buying NFL Sunday Ticket and watcing every game. I’m more than content to watch them when they happen to be on TV. Of course, if they put that pool behind the goal posts again I’ll definitely have to reconsider…