Nothing can extinguish the passion of the superfan

Bull goose loony fans tend to have a genetic predisposition to wear their hearts on their heads and remain undaunted by tough times. Rick Stewart/Getty Images

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As far as seasons go, this time of year is custom-made for the eternal optimist. You got your spring training, the NFL Combine followed by the draft in April, the NHL and NBA trade deadlines and playoff stretch drives, and the start of the NASCAR season, not to mention the Cinderella-rich tradition of March Madness on the horizon. There's a whole lotta hopin' goin' on pretty much everywhere.

The Giants' improbable Super Bowl run proved yet again that anything can happen in this age of across-sports parity. Even the most despairing Cubs fan can look to the Sox (Red or White) for evidence that it's possible to end the longest, most entrenched droughts.

While it still takes uncommon courage -- plus a strong stomach and plump wallet -- to be a keeper of the flame, the communal thrill and exhilirating joy ride of a championship run -- or merely the dream of it -- is enough to keep fans caring in spades through endless cheating scandals, crime waves, lockouts, rising prices and any other dispiriting fooferaw that assaults the senses. Some are driven away in disgust, but it's clearly impossible to fully extinguish the kind of love that moves someone like our very own NHL columnist Allan Muir to name his son after Luc Dufour, an obscure Boston Bruins winger of the early 1980s.

Or own 10 Mike Piazza shirts and jerseys, as reader Barb Paszul of Gansevoort, NY, does while she prays the Big Kahuna will put Andy Pettitte on hold long enough to order some major league team to give her gallant but aging and brittle hero one last season.

Or belong to the Hartford Whalers Booster Club that honors the memory of the perpetually hopeful team that departed for Raleigh, NC, in 1997 only to finally win the Stanley Cup in 2006. (The booster club is currently beating the drums for an initiative that will bring an NHL team back to Hartford.)

Every town has someone like Bob Curto, 52. A certifiable Buffalo Sabres fan, Curto drives a truck with a license plate bearing the team's logo and SCOORE (a salute to longtime Sabres broadcaster Rick Jeanneret; Curto was on the phone at 5 a.m. to order the plate the day it became available). He also constructed a life-sized replica of the Stanley Cup out of sheet metal -- adorning it with the Sabres logo, of course.

The Sabres have a notoriously passionate fan base and the same starcrossed, unfulfillled romance about them that the Bills do. They're an often competitive team that was cruelly robbed of the silverware by Brett Hull's foot-in-the-crease goal in Game 6 of 1999 Stanley Cup Final. After two recent seasons as exciting and inspiring Cup favorites who ultimately fell short, the Sabres lost stars Chris Drury and Daniel Briere to free agency last summer and have been struggling right along with their economically-depressed city. Still, the team and its fans bravely soldier on, undaunted.

As is the case with so many bull goose fans, Curto has his father, a season-ticket holder, to blame for his addiction/affliction. It began with his first visit to the old Memorial Auditorium in 1968. Curto now dwells at HSBC Arena, often accompanied by his daughter, and was at the Winter Classic outdoor game on New Year's Day, coughing up $550 for mementos. (The snow, which now dwells in his freezer, was free.) Curto also regularly attends morning practices before heading to his day gig at Seneca Plumbing and Heating Supply.

"Are you going again tonight?" his boss often asks.

"Does water run downhill?" Curto replies.

Spoken like a true plumbing supply man.

At home, Curto has his "man cave" where he watches games and bangs on walls bedecked with Sabres memorabilia. His collection includes 300 sticks, including a bunch from the Sabres' famed French Connection line of the 1970s. He also owns the penalty box door from the old Aud. ("{Former Sabre] Rob Ray has the other one," he says.) He put in a failed bid for a dasher board and consternated his long-suffering wife by lusting after the old marquee.

"If I'd had the money, I would have put in a bid," he says, before adding, "The starting bid was $20,000."

Curto's boss also indulges his lunacy/devotion, allowing him at playoff time to decorate the store's 35-foot wide front window with Sabres sweaters, full-size blowup photos of the players, newspaper clippings and other appropriate items, such as a broom (a bold prediction of a sweep) or a toilet (when the Sabres are about to flush a foe).

"It looks like Christmas, but it's hockey," Curto says.

As for whether Christmas will come in June this year for his team, which is currently clawing at the final postseason berth in the Eastern Conference, Curto says, "I think we'll make the playoffs. We'll do something at the trade deadline (Tues. Feb. 26)."

Athletes and league poobahs everywhere should fall to their knees and weep heap big tears of gratitude for the devotion and faith of fans like Curto. No matter how much the wealthy, the powerful, the celebrated and the adored in our favorite sports muck things up, the superfans remain glued to their seats and dreaming of glory. Those dreams often grow in the dead of winter.