Green Bay Packers in Foxborough tickets

The Green Bay Packers are professional football's great exception. Curly Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun founded the team on August 11, 1919, and the name came from the Indian Packing Company, which paid $500 for uniforms on the condition that the team be named for its sponsor. Green Bay joined the NFL's forerunner in 1921, making the Packers the third-oldest franchise in the league and the last of the small-town teams still playing in its original city. It is the smallest market in North American major professional sports, a city of roughly 107,000 people, and the only community-owned, non-profit franchise among the major leagues, with more than 537,000 shareholders, none allowed to hold more than 200,000 shares. The football record matches the anomaly: 13 league championships, the most in NFL history and four more than the next closest franchise.

Curly Lambeau built the first dynasty. His teams won three consecutive NFL titles from 1929 to 1931, opened the run with an unbeaten 12-0-1 season in 1929, and strung together 29 consecutive home games without a loss, an NFL record that still stands. Receiver Don Hutson arrived in 1935, led the league in receptions eight times, and delivered three more titles by 1944. Vince Lombardi arrived in 1959 and made Green Bay the team of the 1960s, winning five championships in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls ever played, with Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, and Ray Nitschke in the fold. Green Bay has worn the nickname Titletown since 1961, and the 1967 NFL Championship, the coldest game in NFL history, ended on Starr's quarterback sneak in the final seconds to seal a third straight title. After two lean decades, the modern era arrived: Brett Favre came over in 1992, started 297 consecutive games over his career, an NFL record for quarterbacks, and won three NFL MVP awards; Reggie White signed in 1993 to anchor the defense; and the 1996 team, ranked first in the league in offense, defense, and special teams, won Super Bowl XXXI behind kickoff returner Desmond Howard, the game's MVP. Aaron Rodgers took over for good in 2008, added four MVP awards of his own, and won Super Bowl XLV to close the 2010 season. Six jersey numbers are retired in the Lambeau Field north end zone, from Hutson's 14 to White's 92, and the franchise counts 30 members in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Game day is the franchise's other crown jewel. Lambeau Field opened in 1957 as the first stadium built exclusively for an NFL team, took Curly Lambeau's name in 1965, and sits at 1265 Lombardi Avenue, a street Green Bay renamed for Vince Lombardi in 1968. Demand for Packers tickets has outrun supply for decades: every home game, preseason included, has sold out since 1960, the season ticket waiting list is one of the longest in professional sports, average waits reportedly run more than 30 years, tickets are willed to next of kin, and newborns are placed on the list. Packers fans turned the cheesehead, a Wisconsin nickname tied to the state's cheese production that began as an insult at a 1987 baseball game, into a statewide badge of pride, and the orange triangular hats are a fixture wherever the team plays. At training camp each summer, kids bring their bikes to the locker room so players can ride them to the practice field, a tradition dating to the stadium's construction in the 1950s. The fan base stretches across Wisconsin and into the Midwest, a reach built during six decades of home games in Milwaukee, and NFC North matchups against the Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, and Detroit Lions bring a rivalry edge that has been building for generations.