Exactly when football came up on my radar screen I can't pinpoint.
Baseball is a different story though.
It's part of a working class town's birth right to have a close tie to their sports teams. It's part of the deal. Nobody is an Oriole and a Yankee fan. You can like the Pirates, or the Phillies, even some of those teams out west, but not the Yankees. Paul Blair went to play for the Yankees and was immediately disowned.