I watched the Seattle Seahawks’ last regular season game of their 2012-2013 campaign at one of the few sports bars in the city’s young and trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood, a stripped-down, dank place called “Bill’s”. I was waiting for my college friend Chris, who was in town from San Francisco. Chris had a ruthless hangover, which impaired his ability to make and keep plans. We schemed to meet for kick-off, but I sat through the first half alone surrounded by other people, clapping politely at the TV while perfect strangers at the bar lived and died loudly with every play.  When Chris finally arrived during halftime, he was remarkably lucid for a man who had consumed an entire bottle of hard liquor the night before. Something, I don’t remember what, prompted him to ask me, point-blank: given everything we know about the serious brain injuries incurred by current and former players as a result of the participation in the sport, did I think Americans would still be playing and watching football on TV in 20 years’ time?

I’ve been a fan of football since I was 7, when my dad sat me down in front of the TV and explained the rules. I’ve watched every Super Bowl since 1991. I read about the sport for fun, talk about it with friends who do the same, and from time to time listen to sports radio. On the other hand, I’m also a filmmaker and a pretty avid reader of American History who is constantly in awe of popular culture’s ability to be both deeply symbolic and transparently meaningless. I know exactly what I’m looking at when I watch a football game, but watching this game in late December of 2012 and stammering through an answer to Chris’ question was the first time I’d stopped to wonder what I was looking for.

In retrospect, I think the search for authentic experience is one of the telltale cultural strategies—among the last games, if you will—of advanced industrial societies that appear to be progressing rapidly toward ends of questionable value. Only those already alienated from everything and nothing in particular look again for bucolic values and pre-urban lifestyles, or look away to ethnic and geographic escape. Sport generally, and American Football in particular, seems to satisfy a lust for authentic experiences we struggle to attain within the sugar-walled institutions of American privilege, white collar careerdom, and service-economy drudgery.

What we see in the symbolism of the sport are attempts to recall historical dramas we never lived through, and logos designed to inspire a sense of togetherness that transcend the boundaries of private life at work and home. Two of the NFL’s marquee franchises—the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers—feature names that celebrate classic American rustbelt professions. The Cowboys, 49ers, Chiefs, Raiders, and Vikings make mascots of mythical historical figures who led lives characterized by risk, violence, and criminality. The Philadelphia Eagles remind us that the national mascot is a winged scavenger that delights in beheading rabbits and fish, while the Seattle Seahawks appropriated the name of a famed warship. Many of these names were the subject of widespread voting contests, are plastered on stadiums financed by tax levies, and serve as the faces of lucrative entities worth as much as $2 billion dollars. The symbols and the teams they represent are woven indelibly into the cultural fabric of even otherwise mild-tempered cities like Seattle.

Earlier in its history, representations and storylines surrounding professional football emphasized man’s gladiatorial struggle against nature in northern cities: muddy hulks fighting each other in stadia exposed to downpours, or else risking hypothermia in subzero temperatures. Defense was primary, running plays predominated offensive strategies, and the results were grimy and visually unsavory. The pass-heavy “West Coast Offense” augmented football’s authentic unpleasantness to include the equally classic American tradition of glamour, and in so doing introduced regional connotations to a sport increasingly aimed at nationwide television audiences in the 70s. In the same way that cinema experienced a breakthrough in the 1930s with the advent of the close-up and the arrival of star-driven films, football marketing in the 70s pushed quarterbacks as leading men in the sport’s unscripted and suddenly balletic dramas. The definitive story of west coast quarterback cool came during the 1982 NFC Championship Game, when Joe Montana interrupted the team huddle to point out John Candy in the San Francisco crowd to his befuddled teammates while leading them on a game-winning scoring drive capped by a graceful play known simply as “The Catch”.

Today, the drive for increased marketability has in some cases overridden regional associations with certain styles of play. The Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots call cold-weather cities home, but play finesse brands of football that showcase celebrity quarterbacks who model clothes and act in insurance commercials. The Packers and Patriots often suffer home defeats at the hands of grittier teams who appear more acclimated to the weather patterns in their hometowns than they are. On the other hand, we can’t exactly call those teams failures: they were built to succeed on the national commercial stage of the Super Bowl, which always takes place in a warm weather city, or in a domed stadium which suits the pass-heavy offensive strategies they employ.

What does the experience of being a fan mean if your team isn’t even built to succeed at home? I’m originally from New York, but Seattle is the city I call home. Some neighborhoods are composed entirely of local boutiques, mom-and-pop shops, and independent storefronts; but downtown you’ll behold a bland corporate veneer. We nurtured Amazon and Starbucks, and then rail against what they do to local bookstores and coffee shops. I wonder about how the complex see-saw of corporate glitz and municipal authenticity informs fandom here; wonder whether Seattle—a place infamous as one of the most difficult places to play for opposing teams in the NFL—has a football style or culture marked by place, or whether such a thing is even possible anymore.

The Seattle Seahawks were added to the league as an expansion franchise in 1976, and originally had a reputation as a gimmicky bunch that made heavy use of trick plays and unconventional offensive formations. Seattle reinvented itself as a defensive powerhouse in the 90s, then reincarnated in the 2000s as a finesse squad that implemented the West Coast Offense itself. The Seahawks lost a Super Bowl to Pittsburgh in 2006, went through a wayward period, and has reappeared as a team that plays a hybrid style: both the quarterback and running-back are celebrities, the defense has a reputation for over-aggression, and they make use of the college strategies and trickery they did much earlier in their franchise history.

Watching the Seahawks play in 2012-2013, there’s the sense that literally anything—a blocked field goal, a flea-flicker, an interception returned for a touchdown, a 50-yard run, a fake punt—could happen in their favor at any given moment, and that sense is borne out by the stats. An advanced football metric known as DVOA which measures a given team’s proficiency in offense, defense, and special teams ranks the Seahawks of 2012-2013 in the top-4 in all 3 categories, making them the only NFL team of 33 to achieve the feat. After auditioning every geographic and stylistic mode available through multiple changes in ownership and personnel in its 35-year history, the franchise now employs a combination of them all. Speaking as a person who has spent 20 years here as a transplant from New York City and has never stopped being amazed by the things people do and say here, there’s something telling about all this.

As one of the best-educated and most affluent cities in the nation, varying cultural styles are available for Seattleites to purchase, try-on, and return to the store. Seen one way, it’s one of the least authentic places you’ll ever know, inasmuch as the popular search for authenticity is a hunt for extreme experience outside of middle-class comfort zones. Seattle is one of a dozen major cities on the west coast situated on land formerly belonging to Native Americans, Puget Sound Indians didn’t wear headdresses or carve totems. Ghettos exist in Seattle, but aren’t as obvious and menacing as they’re made to seem in Chicago or New York. Youth culture is vibrant, but more introverted and self-conscious than in Los Angeles. All of the amenities Americans enjoy in other places are here, but seem filtered and refracted through the prism of the region’s mild climate, robust geographical situation, and comparative distance from other major media centers.

Seattle is a place that’s quiet and sleepy enough to carry on lengthy and coherent conversation about the impact of brain injuries on football in a crowded sport’s bar, but one that cheers for its team louder than any other at the actual game.  As famously noisy and inebriated fans drown out the play calls of opposing teams at CenturyLink Field, so too have the city’s natural borders succeeded in filtering out and resisting wholesome categorization. I’ve always known who I’ve followed, but it took me 21 years and a meaningless regular season game to start thinking about why. I was pretty sure until recently that I watched football as a way of forgetting; as it turns out, it’s a way of remembering. We make our symbols, and then they make us.

The game of football is a spectacle whose power lies not so much in taking us out of the world as it does in putting us back in it in unexpected ways.