Green Bay is used to having a Blizzard

There is a professional football team in Green Bay, Wis. It has won more games than it has lost the last six years.

It, of course, is the Green Bay Blizzard, one of the hallmark franchises of the Indoor Football League.

I mention the Blizzard only because I got to wondering today if any teams anywhere were called the Blizzard, what with a blizzard supposed to depend on us in the Great Midwest. And the Not-So-Great Midwest. My guess was no because a) blizzards don't have positive connotations and b) what would the logo or mascot be?

Naturally, I was wrong. There was the Toronto Blizzard of the North American Soccer League, from 1979 to 1984. Who could forget their Soccer Bowl loss to the Tulsa Roughnecks in 1983 before 60,000 fans in ... Vancouver?

There was the Buffalo Blizzard of the National Professional Soccer League from 1992 to 2001.

Fair enough. If teams can call themselves the Hurricanes and Cyclones and Tornadoes, why not be the Blizzard? What's in a name? I mean, who stops and thinks about Green Bay's other pro football team being the Packers? What's that mean, anyway?

According to the impeccable Wikipedia.com:

Curly Lambeau, the team's founder, solicited funds for uniforms from his employer, the Indian Packing Company. He was given $250 for uniforms and equipment, on condition that the team be named for its sponsor (a similar event would occur the following year with the Decatur Staleys, who later became the Chicago Bears). An early newspaper article referred to the new Green Bay team as "the Indians" but by the time they played their first game they had adopted the name "Packers."

In 1920, the Indian Packing Company was purchased by the Acme Packing Company. Acme continued its support of Lambeau's team, and in its first season in the NFL the team wore jerseys with the words "ACME PACKERS" emblazoned on the chest.

Good luck to Acme Sunday against Pittsburgh. Packers and Steelers. Sounds like two hard-working, manly-men teams, eh? Some scrawny field goal kicker will probably decide it.

And good luck to all of us in dealing with the impending blizzard. I'd prefer my blizzards to come from either Dairy Queen or indoor football/soccer instead of  Mother Nature, but whatcha gonna do?