Every sport has its fans, but there’s something about football — American football, with a proper brown, oval ball — that brings out the fanatics.

Sports talk radio host Bobby Curran, who announces University of Hawaii Rainbow Warrior football games at home and on the road, has seen fans across the country. Not surprisingly, what they wear says a lot, Curran said.

"If you go to an Iowa game in Iowa City, you expect the yellow and gold to be worn," he said. "But when you get the yellow shirt, the black pants and the black shoes and then someone informs you their underwear is matching, you get the idea you are in the company of a fanatic."

When it comes to football, fans cannot get enough. Curran has been on mainland highways lined with recreational vehicles painted in school colors and headed for a parking lot two days before kickoff.

Why? Curran, who has been a sportscaster since 1987, sees a variety of answers.

"I think part of it is an identity with youth — even with pro teams — an identification with lost youth."

There’s also a simple competitive spirit that grips people.

"In sports, it’s us versus them," he said. "It’s something for people to grasp onto, and the more successful a team is, the more exhilarating it is."

The fans who love their teams the most have deeply felt emotions. They’ll sit in the rain and snow. They’ll watch losing seasons.

"They’re the sort of people who treat it like a marriage," Curran said. "For better or worse."

Today is the first round of Sunday games in the NFL, the most popular professional sports league in the land. So kick off the season with these superfans who live for their pro and college teams, for better or worse.

BEFORE you judge Dick Rankin for his football fanaticism, know that he doesn’t care what you think. He’s a Washington Redskins fan. Other Redskins fans will understand, he said.

"We are the best fans in the NFL," said Rankin, a 65-year-old honors economics teacher at ‘Iolani School. "I really do think that people think I’m idiotic about it. But I don’t care. I have no shame. I love my Redskins."

He can prove that six ways from Sunday.

» On game day, he flies a Redskins flag outside his Hawaii Kai home. If the team wins, he takes it down and hoists a special, more spectacular team flag.

» He has four Redskins jerseys and about 20 team T-shirts.

» He has a jersey for his wife, Cynthia.

» He has a Redskins jersey for the family dog. When they go to The Shack to watch a game, everyone knows them like everyone at Cheers knew Norm.

» Rankin made his granddaughter wear a Redskins’ cheerleader outfit before she was a year old.

» He once owned a 13-foot Boston Whaler that he painted in Redskins gold and red. Then he put team decals on the hull. It embarrassed his wife whenever they motored around Koko Marina. "When he painted it, I was going to kill him," she said.

But the best expression of his Redskins devotion is Honi, the family’s 12-year-old scarlet macaw.

Rankin taught Honi to speak. He recorded what he wanted the macaw to say and played it over and over. Now, whenever people visit, Rankin gets a little nut, shows it to Honi and asks a question: Who is going to win the Super Bowl?

Honi doesn’t answer right away. People think he’s thinking hard on the question, Rankin said. Then Honi speaks.

"Redskins!"

Rankin grew up in Washington, D.C. — home of the Redskins, duh — and when he was in high school, his uncle got him a minimum-wage job as an usher at home games at RFK Stadium. He got to see the games for free and pocketed tips, too. It was a dream come true, he said.

"Players would come in and you would get to shake hands with them, some of them," he said. "I would take the job today if I could get it."

The Redskins have been to five Super Bowls and Rankin has been to each one. Although the team has won three times, Rankin vividly remembers the 1984 loss to the Los Angeles Raiders in Tampa, Fla.

"My brother Rocky and I were the last two people who left the stadium," Rankin said. "We were devastated. We were heavily favored against the Raiders. I asked him, ‘Do you think the players care as much as we do?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’"

Honestly, could anyone?

THE GOAL each Saturday during the college football season is always the same for Tom Frigge and his fellow Ohio State University alumni: Duplicate a raucous stadium atmosphere when they gather — often before sunrise — at Giovanni Pastrami in Waikiki.

That requires a large amount of cheering, some singing during commercials and when the team scores, a trumpet rendition of the Ohio State fight song.

There were 75 people at the season opener last weekend but if it’s a big game, the place fills up with more than 200 fans, said Frigge, a 60-year-old restaurant food and safety consultant.

"We have to be together," he said. "We are there absolutely every game."

Frigge and his wife, Becky, are both huge Buckeye fans. They turned the spare bedroom at their Kaneohe home into a shrine to Ohio State football.

Everything in it adheres to the Buckeye theme: The area rugs, sheets on the futon bed, the book of crossword puzzles — it’s a long list from a guy who also has bedroom slippers and a robe that proclaim his love for Buckeye Nation. His diplomas are there, too.

But former Ohio State running back Archie Griffin, college football’s only two-time Heisman Trophy winner, has the highest place of honor in Frigge’s collection. The fan has an autographed picture, a 1-foot-square swatch of the stadium astroturf Griffin competed on — Frigge bought it for $50 when the school replaced the field — and a souvenir you can find only in Hawaii.

Frigge got it when Griffin visited with local Ohio State alumni in 2005.

"I still have the lei he wore when he spoke," Frigge said. "He took it off and I asked him for it. I have it right here in a baggie."

ONE OF the biggest football fans in Hawaii doesn’t have a boat or a memory-laden room. He doesn’t even have a voice to cheer with anymore.

Brian Burke is a 54-year-old quadraplegic with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. When his beloved Chicago Bears score a touchdown, all he can do is smile. If older sister Kathy O’Connor is with him, she’ll cheer on his behalf.

Burke lives in The Care Center of Honolulu. He has a 42-inch flat-screen television that his sister bought for him. During football season, he’ll watch up to five games a day.

O’Connor, a 64-year-old state social worker, makes a schedule each week of the games her brother wants to watch.

On game days, she’ll call the care home at the appropriate times to get someone to change the channel for her brother. It doesn’t matter where she is or what she is doing. O’Connor has stepped out of church services and work meetings to ensure her brother doesn’t miss a single down.

She knows it’s important.

"It’s crucial," O’Connor said. "Put yourself in his place: You couldn’t do anything else and you can’t communicate and the nurses don’t understand you and you are lying there watching golf or a paid info­mercial."

Several years ago, her brother owned a moving business in Honolulu, O’Connor said. Then he got ALS, a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. He didn’t tell anyone. Family members tried to call but his phone was disconnected, his sister said. Letters were returned.

"I found him homeless in the park and he agreed to let me help him," O’Connor said. "It took almost a year to get him diagnosed."

Burke has been at the care home on Bachelot Street since 2004. His mind remains sharp, but he breathes through a ventilator and his meals come through a tube. Football is his escape.

O’Connor isn’t really a football fan but she will do anything to help her brother. She is there every weekend. His smile can light up a room, she said.

For the past several years, when the NFL Pro Bowl players have come to Honolulu, O’Connor has stood in autograph-signing lines so she could pass notes to players asking them to please come visit her brother.

So far, no one has responded.