Mile High Hopes

“Hope? Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

– “Red” Redding, Shawshank Redemption

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

– Andy Dufresne, Shawshank Redemption

We were five minutes into one of my youth soccer seasons when I started to worry about the perfect record I’d hoped for that year. I know that fretfulness may seem to have come a little quickly, but we were already down 3-0. My concerns ended up being well-placed. We lost that game 8-0. It ended up being one of our more competitive contests of the season. The perfect record I’d hoped for… sort of came true. We went 0-12, and were perfectly awful. Hope? Maybe hope is a dangerous thing.

Sometimes hope comes in a series of events spread out over time, and sometimes it comes in one giant leap. When the Denver Broncos paid their very first visit to the Super Bowl in 1977, they were the proud owners of a 12-2 record, and a shiny new hand-me-down quarterback named Craig Morton. The team came into the season with a lot of hope following a 9-5 campaign in 1976, one of only three winning seasons the team had managed in their first 17 years of existence.

As a matter of fact, that season wasn’t only the organization’s first trip to the Super Bowl, it was their first trip to the playoffs. From that moment on, the rabid fan base for these Broncos has had not only high expectations, but Mile High hopes. It would be almost another decade before the team saw another Super Bowl trip, and another 20 before they’d finally win one. All along that pathway and with every peak and valley in between, Broncos fans have HOPE.

Which has made it all the more frustrating for that hopeful fan base that these Broncos have another four-season streak on the books without needing to break out their unis after week 17. Since winning Super Bowl 50 to send Peyton Manning off in style, the Broncos will play at least 80 regular season games before another playoff contest. I say at least 80 games as for the first time in the last few years, there is a strong surge of hope out there amongst the Broncos faithful, with meaningful and exciting additions on both sides of the ball and on the sidelines as well.

No team wins on every chance they take in the offseason, but Denver has made several solid and high-percentage bets along the way, not only setting themselves up to start building steam in the near term, but also as to be a threat in the AFC West again for years to come. With the current Super Bowl champ having not only come from their own division, the Broncos will get plenty of opportunity to test the mettle of their shiny new pieces early and often.

While odds are probable that the Broncos haven’t suddenly vaulted themselves to the front of the division, let alone conference or league, they are garnering solid buzz from fans and pundits alike for the first time in quite a while. While the team they’ll be figuring out from afar this offseason will need some seasoning and time, they could very well put this team back on the map, and primarily with home-grown talent.

When this season kicks off, it will be been 43 years since the first time this team took the field in a postseason game, and that flame of hope has both burned brightly and sputtered and guttered along the way. But for the first time in a few years, the Denver Broncos and their fans go into the season with that fire decidedly heating up again. It certainly couldn’t have come at a better time for the city or the fanbase. Hope for these Denver Broncos? That’s a very good thing, and no good thing ever dies.