Did you have any trouble finding my house?" said Diane Bonilla Lee.
Honestly, no. I could have seen it from space. Hers was the only home in her Sandy neighborhood with a big Tampa Bay Buccaneers helmet in the window and a team flag hanging from the roof.
As a point of reference, she was the only person in the neighborhood wearing red, bronze and black pirate earrings, too.
I won't even get into the Bucs coffee mugs and mousepads, the nearly two-dozen hair scrunchies, the hand-made good luck poster from fans in Utah, the bumper stickers, coasters, car flags, caps, jerseys . . .
"If they make it," she said, "I buy it."
Lee is well aware of her obsession. Other years, when she took down the Christmas tree, the Bucs always lost the next weekend. So this year she left the tree up. Doggone if the Buccaneers didn't make the Super Bowl.
That's great news for the tree, and for Lee, but the fire marshal might be a little concerned.
So maybe she's gone a bit crazy over this Super Bowl thing. She's been waiting a long time. Since before Steve Young passed through Tampa on his way to fame and glory. Since Lee Roy Selmon, Ricky Bell and John McKay were around.
It's not like she's going to take this sitting down.
Lee and her husband, Ryan, left Friday for San Diego with one plan in mind: Super Bowl or Bust! They managed to land a hotel room immediately after Tampa Bay beat Philadelphia in the NFC championship game, which was a miracle in itself. Game tickets were a bigger problem. She had one NFL contact who said he could possibly score her a pair. It wasn't the $1,000-$1,500 asking price that gave her pause.
You can't put a price on true love. It's that the seats were smack in the middle of Raider Nation.
She agreed that for her own safety, she should take her business elsewhere.
So the Lees are goin' where the sun keeps shining through the pourin' rain. She plans to park herself outside the stadium, Sunday afternoon, with her portable TV and some working capital, and wait it out.
Sometime during the day — hopefully sooner than later — she'll land tickets and her life will be complete. From the dreadful teams she watched as a kid to now is a long trip.
"I can't sleep just thinking about it," she said. "I'm not hungry, either."
Lee became a football fan at age 4, watching the Miami Dolphins on TV with family members. But when the Bucs arrived, she had a team to call her own. She was a season ticket holder from the start.
She landed her first radio job in the late 1970s. At first, she worked as a DJ. Her sports career began with covering the now-defunct Tampa Bay Rowdies soccer team. Soon she convinced management she could cover the Bucs, as well.
All went fine until she walked in the locker room. That was an era in which equal access was a hot issue. Some players ignored her, some hassled her and some treated her respectfully. Sort of the way a person gets treated at any job.
She waded through it all, the good and bad, becoming friends with some players. But unlike many reporters, she never did become jaded enough to stop loving her team. Not even when a player — celebrating Tampa Bay's ascension to the NFL championship game in January, 1980 — carried her into the showers and turned on the water. It ruined her tape recorder, not to mention her makeup.
Even so, she says, the hardest part was not cheering from the press box.
Her career eventually took her to Atlanta, Phoenix and Salt Lake City, in various areas of broadcasting. Her Bucs mementos always went with her.
Nobody forgets a first love.
Thanks to premium cable programming, she's still only an on-switch away.
Twenty-six years after she began loving the Buccaneers, Lee might have stayed home and watched Sunday's game on television like most everyone else. But she was close to the action in the beginning, why not be close now?
Watching their first trip to the Super Bowl on TV just wouldn't do.
Besides, she needed to be someplace where people would appreciate her earrings.