Not judging. Interacting, exchanging thoughts. You have information, some of which I haven't seen, and wouldn't see just talking to people who agree with me all the time. You have a different perspective on things and it's more interesting to discuss those different points of view than to argue about whether the team should start Brock or Manning again.
I actually grew up in Maine in the 80s, and the Giants fans were by far the majority. Hardly any Patriots fans in my area up to when I moved away in the 90s. Then, when visiting family, the area was full of "lifelong" Patriots fans after the Super Bowl runs. So, although limited to one small piece of New England, I actually do have direct personal experience with that particular issue.
I find Ravens fans boring. Not to oversimplify, but they're all basically the same. What I find interesting in Patriot fans is the mixture of the old-school diehards with the new bandwagoners and how those two groups interact.
I didn't mean to imply that the people posting were recent fans, I was speaking about the fanbase as a whole. A place like this is where I would find a higher concentration of the actual lifelong fans. Outside a Patriot message board, I'm much more likely to encounter a more casual, probably more recent fan. Without having actual data available, I would speculate that the core of a board like this is primarily real fans who go back even into the less successful parts of the franchise's history, with a bunch of people who have joined more recently and are excited by the success. The interaction between those two groups, those who experienced the lows as well as the highs, and those who haven't known anything but success interests me.
