Last week, I wrote a column about our ranking by Sporting News as the 26th best sports city in the country. My contention, more than slightly tongue in cheek, was that we were better than that.

The response to the column via talkbacks and e-mail was very interesting. At least the response from some people was interesting. Some of them, of course, would hate the Bible if I wrote it and they seem to get off being snide, sophomoric and silly.

There were people who thought we ranked somewhere well below 26, and it got me thinking about the nature of fandom and what it means to be a sports fan. Normally I've got a point of view in this column space, but today I've got questions without any clear answers.

The dilemma is one that we've had lots of experience with in this state. We have teams with bright shining moments of incredible success mixed with long periods of labor in the trenches without any kind of relief from the angst and sorrow that comes with losing season after losing season. Think about it.

Think about the Packers in the period between Vince Lombardi and Ron Wolf, Mike Holmgren and Brett Favre. Our Brewers had a good run in the Yount and Molitor years and then futility and losing became the bywords as we kept changing managers and kept getting the same results. The Bucks had brief success three times in their history. The years of Abdul-Jabbar, Lanier and the Robinson-Allen-Cassell trio rocked, but we also have been locked into a dismal world of failure for years. Wisconsin and Marquette are good occasionally and bad a lot. 

What all of this represents, of course, is a dilemma for us, the sports fans. How do we react? During the good times the answer is an easy one. We climb aboard the train and ride it until the ride comes to an end.

But what about most of the time? What about all those years when loss piles upon loss, when spirits are low, when coaches are hired and fired, when players are traded, cut and retired?

What is our obligation during those times? Do we even have an obligation to our teams, or is the concept of obligation strictly a one-way street?

Obviously, our teams have an obligation to us. They ask us for support and in exchange they owe us expertise and effort and an honest striving for victory. Anything less and they have reneged on their implicit promise to us. Not every move is going to be successful and nobody wins all the time. But we fans have to feel like our teams are trying, sparing no expense in attempting to build a winner. I think we can live with losing. But we feel cheated if it's stupidity or lack of effort that goes into the losses.

But what do we bring to the equation?

Is there a civic duty we have to support our teams? Cities that have big-time athletics are a rare breed in this country. There is obviously a civic value to having a professional baseball and basketball team in our town. Should we support those teams out of a sense of civic responsibility? If you look at the example of the PGA Tour event that has now died in Milwaukee you see that lack of attendance and interest has a direct relation to the existence of a sporting event in our city. Do we owe our city something?

Do we owe our teams something? Just because they don't win doesn't mean they aren't trying. I could make a good argument that the Bucks have worked their collective tails off trying to bring a winning team to the city. I could make the case that this team and owner have suffered incredible disappointment by not being able to provide a winner for Milwaukee. Sure, there have been bad decisions. Any team that's gone though head coaches at the rate the Bucks have can't have been perfectly run.

But it's not for lack of effort that they haven't been successful. They aren't coasting through life. They get to work early and stay late. They do all the things they are supposed to do, and then some. And still they end up a losing franchise.

So, for example, what do we owe the Milwaukee Bucks? We've got several alternatives.

We can stay behind them, rooting and buying tickets and hoping that things get better. We can cut off their economic support, don't go to games, don't watch on TV so the ratings plunge and they lose advertising revenue. We can go manic and call sports talk shows every day and holler for firings and changes. We can ignore them. We could do any and all of those things.

The big part of that question, of course, is whether there is anything we can do that will influence how they go about their business. Will public reaction make the Bucks, or any other team, change anything they do in order to achieve a better result? That's another one to which I don't know the answer.

Finally, does it make any difference how we feel?

Great questions in need of thoughtful answers.