But do you know why we really relish our UND hockey and women's basketball teams so much? Do you know why their success in recent years means so much to us? Do you know why the fashion color in Grand Forks is kelly green 365 days of the year, not just on St. Patrick's Day?
It's because their success helps us shed our inferiority complex about being from North Dakota and being from Grand Forks, that's why.
Most fans live vicariously through their athletic favorites. That's especially true here, where we were a humble, inferiority-complexed lot even before 54-plus feet of water reminded us of our mortality.
We shouldn't feel that way, except the rest of the universe makes us feel invisible. But there are times we're very visible, like when the floodwaters hit or UND wins a national championship.
Sioux hockey plays in Division I, making us feel Division I in the process. In this state, we're Division I in such matters as wind, flatness, lefse-making, lutefisk-consumption, continental geographical centerness, hard red durum wheat and friendliness.
Other than the wheat, the friendliness and (of course) the lutefisk, that doesn't give us much reason to wag our index finger proudly. Enter the hockey team and its Division I status.
Even without national titles -- the ones in 1959, 1963, 1980, 1982, 1987, 1997 and (coming soon) 1999 -- the hockey makes the state feel big-time. As nationally strong as the football teams at North Dakota and North Dakota State have been for decades, they've never once played Notre Dame, like occasionally happens in hockey.
That's the difference.
And the women's basketball team, in search of its third straight Division II national title today? They help us get over that inferiority complex we have about Fargo.
As a city, we compare ourselves to Fargo, not to Minot or Bismarck or Crookston or Emerado or Pine Bluff. That's because it's our rival.
But, let's face it, when it comes to easily countable items such as population, riches, stores and radio talking-head buffoons, Fargo has more.
Fargo gets the Rolling Stones; we get Lyle Lovett. Fargo gets a monster truck show; we get go-kart races. Fargo's best-known home-grown musician is Jonny Lang; ours is Gary Emerson. (Don't get me wrong, this is not a shot at Gary Emerson. He's great. But he won't be opening for the Rolling Stones anytime soon.)
Fargo gets such important items as Red Lobster, Barnes & Noble and a dome years before we do. It also got Ed Schultz first, so perhaps that isn't a true standard.
But you get the picture. Adding to the image of Fargo mastery over Grand Forks was the success of the Bison football and women's basketball teams. But the 1990s found a turn in football fortunes and now the last three years have found the same in women's basketball.
Doubling, tripling or quadrupling the enjoyment of seeing the women win national titles is that they've come at the expense of NDSU, which previously had a stronghold on that distinction. By the same token, if NDSU wins back the crown, Fargoans will savor it even more than before because the Sioux had held it.
This afternoon, the Sioux women will go for their third straight national title. In two weeks, the hockey team likely will go for its title.
I predict wins for both. But whether or not they take home those titles, they once again have made us feel top-shelf.
Top-shelf, like we deserve to feel.