THE PONIES: A TWENTY-YEAR BOND

(Blog Draft – AMART.studio / November 2025)

I didn’t grow up in a football family.

I didn’t inherit a team.

I wasn’t born into blue.

I chose the Indianapolis Colts when I was thirteen years old—walking around the neighborhood with a Walkman, blasting Celine Dion and the Les Mis soundtrack, smack in the middle of puberty, and somehow deciding that Edgerrin James—with his gold teeth, Miami swagger, and dreads—was the one.

I couldn’t explain it then.

I still don’t fully understand it now.

But the geometry was already forming.

I loved Edge.

I loved that he wasn’t the obvious pick.

I loved that the Colts weren’t the “cool” 90s team.

Something in me gravitated toward the thing that felt real, even if I didn’t have the language for it yet.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that choice was the first domino.

2006 — Iraq

I’m twenty. Called up for deployment.

I turn 21 in-country and “celebrate” with a single warm Bud Heavy.

Night shift.

Twelve on, twelve off.

Football only existed through late-night grainy feeds on some military network that felt like it was haunted.

The Colts were having a wild season.

Bob Sanders was a missile with dreadlocks.

But the moment that changed everything came in January 2007.

AFC Championship, Colts vs. Patriots

I stay up 36 hours for that game.

Barely sleeping.

Fresh off a Dear John call.

Body fried.

Mind numb.

My buddy falls asleep by halftime.

Colts down 21–3.

And I’m sitting there in the sand, pissed, muttering the same thing every Colts fan said back then:

“Peyton’s doing it again.”

Then the impossible.

The improbable.

The comeback.

Bob Sanders flying downhill.

Marlin Jackson jumping destiny.

The noise in that stadium traveling across the world and hitting me straight in the chest.

That was the night the Colts stopped being “my team” and became something else entirely.

That was the night the Colts claimed me back.

Not as a hobby.

Not as fandom.

As a bond.

Most people won’t understand what it meant to watch that game from a war zone.

But I do.

And anyone who lived through that era of Colts football knows exactly why that night mattered.

The Epilogue — Prince in the Rain

I get home days before the Super Bowl.

Prince performs Purple Rain

—in the rain—

and Bob Sanders gets a pick and a forced fumble.

The Colts win their first Super Bowl of my lifetime.

It was the perfect ending to a movie…

right before I walked into the barracks and got jumped.

Right before the years that would eventually break my brain.

Right before the collapse that became my book.

The Ponies were there for all of it.

2025 — Recovery

I’m turning 40.

My body is back online.

My cognition is sharper than it ever was.

I’m rebuilding a life with intention, clarity, and momentum.

And the Colts?

8-2.

Jonathan Taylor on an all-time tear.

Carlie rewriting the entire identity of the franchise.

A team with swagger again.

A team that feels alive.

A team that looks like destiny.

It’s not lost on me that my recovery and their resurgence are happening at the same time.

Thirteen-year-old me chose the Colts.

Twenty-one-year-old me bonded with them in Iraq.

Forty-year-old me is catching up to the geometry I didn’t know was forming.

This isn’t your average fan story.

This is a twenty-year parallel arc between a franchise and a kid who grew into a man through war, art, collapse, and recovery.

And this year?

This year it feels like both of us are stepping into something bigger.

The inner mystic was Mickey.

The outer mystic is the Ponies.

And tomorrow, we tell the Eight Sundays.