Cote: Miami Dolphins own city’s heart, but Dolfans deserve new heroes — and new glory days | Opinion

You never forget your first love, so it is often said. For many or us, that first love was sports.

That one magical year that made us smitten. A certain player, maybe. A championship season. A memory that never left. That one team that was, is, interwoven in your life’s timeline. The team that helped raise you and never left you. The team you will always love with fierce loyalty, even when it drives you crazy. Even if it lets you down.

The Miami Dolphins are that team for South Florida.

The Dolphins are that team for me, because I have lived it. Growing up in South Florida, I was a kid alongside my Dad at the old Orange Bowl for the franchise’s first ever home game on September 2, 1966. Had an old cloth Dolphins pennant on my bedroom wall. Collected player cards (Wahoo McDaniel!) that Royal Castle gave out.

As the Fins begin their 59th season in professional football Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium against the Jacksonville Jaguars, I will be the grown-up-and-old columnist writing impartially about the team (no cheering in the press box), but inside me will always be the boy who pretended he was Paul Warfield while playing catch with his Dad in the backyard.

I saw a guy shopping at Publix the other day wearing an “I Still Call It Joe Robbie Stadium” T-shirt, and I had to murmur to him, “I like the shirt” as we passed each other. He smiled, nodding. Not another word was spoken, but we connected.

We, and a multitude, share a bond that knits this community in a way our other biggest teams cannot. Almost all sports fans follow and root for several teams, college and pro, but most of us have that one team that’s closest to the bone, the heart.

The expansion-era Dolphins were 15-39-2 their first four seasons when lightning struck.

Don Shula arrived in 1970, everything changed, and the Fins were in the Super Bowl in 1971, winning it with the Perfect Season in ‘72, then winning it all again in ‘73. Shula had forever put Miami on the national sports map and in the nation’s conversation.

He lifted us. Made us champions. Forged us as a community. The Dolphins have not reigned over the NFL since, but you never forget your first love or stop longing for that feeling again.

The club enjoyed a second wave that grew the fandom and its hopes in 1983 when Dan Marino was drafted. Electricity flew from his fingertips. Shula had won titles a decade before with a ground-borne team led by Larry Csonka’s bull runs. Now, he saw what he had in Marino, pivoted and introduced the air-raid style still prevalent in the modern game.

Marino gilded the Dolphins and the city of Miami as sexy and exciting to mirror the TV sensation of the day, “Miami Vice.”

He never did win a Super Bowl, Marino. Shula told me just before he died at age 90 in 2020 that was his greatest regret, “to not win one with Dan.”

Yet the aura and greatness of Shula and Marino remain in the eternal Miami deities, the football saints, as the 2024 squad begins another season trying to emulate that, chasing halcyon ghosts, searching for new glory days.

We all know the math by now. The Dolphins have not won a Super Bowl since 1973, not played in one since the 1984 season, and not won a playoff game since 2000 — that 23-year season drought the current longest in the NFL.

Left tackle Terron Armstead said the team feels what Dolfans endure.

“Everyone in this locker room, we understand the hardship from the fan base and not seeing success, not seeing those big victories,” he said. “We wear that, too. I don’t want fans to think we’re oblivious to it. We want them to get bragging rights. We carry that burden, too.”

The current Dolphins in the iteration of coach Mike McDaniel, star receiver Tyreek Hill and a revitalized quarterback Tua Tagovailoa are winning, exciting. They thrill us with speed. They are fun. But they have not yet ended any of the droughts listed above. That is their litmus test.

Shula, Marino ... and who? Who will rise to join them on that highest, historic franchise echelon?

Dolfans starve for new glory days, and the heroes who deliver them at long last will be kings forever.

Generations of Dolfans know of the team’s greatest times only as memories handed down, yellowed newspaper clippings or old videos watched. The Dolphins are a family heirloom, passed from generations.

We were a barren sports landscape for major teams when Joe Robbie gifted us the Dolphins in the old AFL in ‘66.

Hurricanes football was around, of course, but lousy, decades from when it would start really mattering in 1983 with its first of five national championships (the last in 2001).

You might argue Canes football challenges the Fins for the heart and soul of Miami sports — especially now, with this UM season taking off so impressively. But the NFL is bigger than the college game around here. Just look at Canes home crowds when the opponent isn’t a marquee school.

The Marlins won two World Series early but let the momentum dissipate with years of bad, underspending ownership that continues now, choking off any shot of this ever being a “baseball town.”

The Florida Panthers just won their first Stanley Cup but have only been really good lately, and it’s doubtful the Broward team can ever own South Florida beyond the niche level.

Likewise Inter Miami in soccer. The arrival of global megastar Lionel Messi has made that team matter here, but what about when he leaves in a or year or so?

Other than UM football, the Miami Heat is the only franchise that can make a claim to run this town.

The Heat had its Shula and Marino in Pat Riley and Dwyane Wade. They borrowed the “biggest-thing-in-Miami” trophy those four years when LeBron James led the “Big 3.” The Heat has won three NBA titles. But lost momentum reminds us this was never really a basketball town first.

The Dolphins arrived in the midst of the massive Cuban migration that changed the face of Miami, gave it a new language, challenged our community’s ability to adapt, and accept. The McDuffie riots of 1980 exposed a racial divide in the city. Politics would divide us now.

But across all manner of tumult, cheering for the Miami Dolphins, and now for new glory days, has been a common bond that has helped knit a diverse community.

Dolphins defender and former Hurricane Calais Campbell, in his 16th NFL season but first in Miami, is excited by what surrounds him.

“I believe this team has a chance,” he said the other day.

Super Bowl, he meant.

Hill has been preaching about an elevated excitement within the team.

“I do feel that,” Tagovailoa agreed. “I would say it’s the feel of, ‘Dang, this does feel different.’”

New safety Jordan Poyer, formerly of the rival Buffalo Bills: “I just feel an energy. This group seems really close. It seems like they got something to prove.”

We have heard it before. Optimism the week of an NFL opener is rote. What will the season feel like as Thanksgiving nears and the playoffs loom?

Dolfans have tough hide, a genetic necessity. They have been teased before. Had hopes raised, seen hopes crash.

But Miami Dolphins fans won’t ever stop believing. They can’t.

You never forget your first love, and with it that feeling that anything is possible.