When Matt Brodsky was 5 years old, his father and grandfather attended a convention in Michigan. It was right around the time Super Bowl XVI was being played in Detroit between the Cincinnati Bengals and San Francisco 49ers. Brodsky’s father brought his son some Bengals gear as a souvenir, and the boy’s love for the team was sparked.

Bengals fans Erin DeRose and her daughter, Mya, will watch Sunday’s game from their home in Lewiston. Courtesy of Erin DeRose

“I’ve been miserable ever since,” said Brodsky, 47, who lives in York and owns Yummies, the Kittery candy store founded by his father in 1986.

There aren’t many of them, but Brodsky and other long-suffering Bengals fans in Maine are euphoric as their team prepares to face the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LVI on Sunday night. The Bengals have been to the Super Bowl twice before, losing both times in the 1980s. There have been plenty of lean years since.

“This is all I’ve ever wanted. It’s been a hard road,” said Erin DeRose, 38, a Bengals fan from Lewiston who lived in Cincinnati throughout her childhood.

While the Rams were in the Super Bowl as recently as three years ago and won the title game in 2000, it’s been 33 years since the Bengals have advanced to the Super Bowl. In fact, until this season, it had been 32 years since Cincinnati had even won a playoff game. This year’s playoff run is all the more remarkable considering that the team had a combined six wins the past two seasons.

Bengals fan Ben Keller, 38, of Portland spent $1,900 for a pair of tickets in the nosebleed seats in the upper deck of SoFi Stadium Inglewood, California, where he will attend Sunday’s game with his father, Ted Keller.

Prior to his current job as manager of sales and operations for the Maine Celtics, Keller, an Ohio native, worked for the Columbus Clippers minor league baseball team. To get the tickets, he made calls to a number of friends.

“Luckily one of them came through. I was able to buy tickets at face value, then the first call I made was to my dad,” Keller said.

Some, like Keller, DeRose and Dave Carter of Falmouth, are transplants who came to Maine from Ohio. Some, like Brodsky and Noah Carroll, were attracted as kids to the team’s signature tiger-striped helmet.

Carroll, 24, of Farmington, grew up in Gardiner, where he was an avid fan of the Gardiner High Tigers. Carroll’s love for the Gardiner Tigers imprinted on the Cincinnati Bengals. He’s never been to a Bengals game, never even been to Cincinnati, but Carroll loves the team all the same.

“I got a lot of crap,” said Carroll, an assistant coach with the University of Maine at Farmington women’s basketball team. “But a lot of people have texted me the last couple of weeks and reached out. ‘I’m happy for you. I’m happy it finally happened.'”

The history of the Bengals contains more valleys than peaks. Since their inaugural season in 1968, the franchise has had only 18 winning seasons in 54 years. That’s fewer winning seasons than Tom Brady enjoyed in his career, and the Bengals had a 30-year head start.

The 1990s were a particularly bad decade for the Bengals. Their only winning season came in 1990, and they went 57-108 over the decade. The losing extended into the early 2000s. Frustrated one night in 2004, Brodsky’s anger at the team kept him wide awake, so he got out of bed and fired off a letter to team owner Mike Brown, son of Paul Brown, the NFL legend who founded the Bengals after years running and coaching the Cleveland Browns.

Matt Brodsky has lots of Cincinnati Bengals memorabilia in his home in York. Courtesy of Matt Brodsky

To Brodsky’s surprise, Brown wrote back, saying the team was trying, and was beefing up its scouting department. Brodsky still has Brown’s letter in his large collection of Bengals memorabilia.

“Paul Brown started the Bengals, and he’s one of the greatest football minds. It’s not like some schmuck started them,” Brodsky said. “If you have passion for something, you can’t get rid of it. I have never liked another team, as much as I’ve thought about it.”

In 2017, Brodsky played in the charity golf tournament run by former Cincinnati coach Marvin Lewis. While there, he got to meet former Bengals head coach Sam Wyche, who coached the team to Super Bowl XXIII, a 20-16 loss to the 49ers in 1989. Brodsky played Wyche his ringtone, Wyche’s infamous dressing down of unruly Bengals fans at Riverfront Stadium. “You don’t live in Cleveland. You live in Cincinnati!”

“You are a nut job,” Brodsky remembers Wyche saying.

Born in 1964, Carter was a senior in high school when the Bengals played in Super Bowl XVI in 1982, losing to San Francisco, 26-21.

“I expected us to win, and it was surprising we didn’t. I remember thinking, what’s up with this Joe Montana? I remember feeling, we’re good, we’ll be back. And we’ve only been back once since,” said Carter, who works for Mascoma Bank.

The Bengals went 2-14 in 2019, selected Heisman trophy-winning quarterback Joe Burrow with the No. 1 pick, then went 4-11-1 in 2020. Burrow played just 10 games and suffered a season-ending knee injury, so expectations were low entering this season.

Then, the Bengals started winning. They clinched the AFC North, then beat the Las Vegas Raiders in the wild-card round for their first playoff win since 1990. When the Bengals fell behind the Kansas City Chiefs, 21-3, in the second quarter of the AFC championship game, Bengals fans could be excused for thinking “well, it was a great season. One they can build upon.”

The second-half comeback was something to which Bengals fans are unaccustomed.

“I thought they could come back, but I wasn’t sure. It was Kansas City. I expected them to keep putting up points,” Carter said.

“It’s hard to be optimistic when you’ve been hit in the gut so many times in the last four decades … I did not see that (comeback) coming. I really didn’t,” Brodsky said.

Other than Keller, none of the other fans interviewed have big plans for the Super Bowl. They’ll watch at home with family.

“I’ve been invited to a couple parties, but I’m a big ritual person,” DeRose said. “The last few games, it’s only been me, my fiancé and our daughter. I need to concentrate. I need to sit in front of my TV. I need to cry. I cry a lot. When they clinched the division, I cried. When they won their first wild-card playoff game, I cried. I don’t want anybody to see that.”

Keller said friends who live in Cincinnati tell him the city is going crazy, excited the Bengals are no longer the biggest joke in the NFL. DeRose remembers being able to see the fireworks going off at Riverfront Stadium, the Bengals’ previous home, from her childhood home. She knows what a Super Bowl win would mean to the city that hasn’t seen a championship since the Reds won the World Series in 1990.

She sees the pictures of Cincinnati lit up in orange every night.

“This could be our time, right? I don’t think we’re going to fade away,” DeRose said.