DALLAS -- Imagine quitting your job and moving your family across the world to pursue a dream: witnessing every game an NFL team played in a season.
This guy did.
An Australia man who temporarily moved to Wisconsin to follow the Packers a few years ago was back in the United States on Sunday to watch the team play in the Super Bowl. He was outside Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, with a few old friends from the last time he saw the Packers play live.
"It's the time of my life," said Wayne Scullino, 33, a few hours before kickoff. "The place is going mental."
Back in 2007, Scullino quit his job as a sales executive for a telecommunications company and sold his home in Sydney to bring his wife and two small children to Wisconsin for a season following the Packers.
He said his dream to move to Green Bay started when he was 15 years old and a friend gave him a videotape of an old game between the Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. Scullino was smitten.
The story made him famous among faithful Cheeseheads. Scullino said he kept in touch with hundreds of them over the Internet when he went home.
He reconnected with a few in Texas. One fellow Packers fan read in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Scullino was going to the game and needed a ticket and gave him an extra one, he said.
"I had expected to beg, borrow and steal," Scullino said.
Scullino said his life was back on track after returning to Australia to find the recession had hit and a new job was much harder to find than he expected. He moved in with his in-laws for a while.
He said he had written most of a book about his experience, called "The Once in a Lifetime Fan." He said he would write the final chapter after the Super Bowl.
It might even explain his Packers fever to his friends back home. "I try to talk to them about it, but they just don't get it," he said.
Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press
