For some fans, Bud Grant’s garage sale has become a pilgrimage

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BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Darrin Eilertson canceled his Minnesota Vikings season tickets months after the team’s loss in the 1999 NFC Championship Game and hadn’t been to a Vikings game since the loss to the Atlanta Falcons when he paid $345 for Bud Grant’s old Hudson’s Bay coat at the Hall of Fame coach’s garage sale two years ago. In frigid temperatures at TCF Bank Stadium for the Vikings’ playoff game against the Seattle Seahawks in January, the coat was supposed to do no less than perform an exorcism.

Eilertson bundled up in the coat to tailgate in the minus-6 temperatures on Jan. 10, and ventured into a Vikings game for the first time since one of the most painful losses in the team’s heartbreak-laden history. When Grant tossed his coat to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and strode to midfield in a polo shirt for the coin toss, Eilertson’s cell phone reverberated with text messages and his hopes soared.

Three hours later, the Minneapolis attorney stood crestfallen again, after Blair Walsh’s 27-yard field goal broke to the left of the goalpost, landing in a neighboring compartment to Gary Anderson’s 1999 miss in the temporal lobes of Vikings fans. And on Wednesday, for some reason, Eilertson knew he had to come back to Grant’s garage sale and tell the soon-to-be 89-year-old coach what had become of his old coat. Perhaps it was because Grant’s act of bravado that day had given Vikings fans so much hope. Perhaps it’s because no other coach in Vikings history has left fans with so much.

Binders of fan mail Bud Grant received while coaching the Vikings …

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