When I go to a sporting event cheering for the visiting team, I ask friends that would know how the atmosphere is. My main concern: will people be awful to me if I’m wearing opposing colors? Almost always the answer is no, that everyone will be fine. On one such evening I was all geared up in my Capitals attire and taking the Buffalo metro down to see them visit the Sabres. Of course the metro car I was in was chock full of Sabres fans. One asked me where I was from, and rather than explain that I was from a DC-commuter city in central Maryland, I skimmed and simply answered, “Washington DC.” The Buffalo crowd were generally appeased and then we just started talking about hockey.

That’s convenient for me, for the Capitals, but most of my fan allegiances aren’t as easily explained. I like a lot of different teams for a lot of different reasons; I’ve only spent 6 months living within 350 miles of the team I care most passionately about, I talked myself into following a random NFL team at age 17, and asked a friend to pick out a soccer team for me to follow.

When people find out that I follow sports, they want to know what teams I like. It’s always a laborious process to explain that I root for the University of Michigan, the Washington Capitals and Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Lions and New York Jets, the Detroit Tigers and Washington Nationals, whatever team Lebron James or Chauncey Billups is on, Fulham FC, the University of Maryland and Rochester Institute of Technology and Michigan State University. It’s even worse to explain how I came to root for whichever comes up.

I understand why the Buffalo fans were pleased that I was from Washington, and not a traitorous native choosing the flash of Ovechkin over the local team. But as someone that moves frequently and was born to root for a team almost 500 miles away from my childhood home, I don’t care too much about where fans are from. All that matters to claim to be a “true” fan of any team is to wish them the best in every situation. Sometimes when the playoffs are out of reach that means rooting for losses-turned-draft picks, and sometimes that can happen just eight winless games into a shortened NBA season (come on Wizards, this draft is gonna be good!).