For about a week leading up to the A.F.C. championship game, Meredith Nolan had been living on a hulking research vessel parked in an Antarctic port. The ship, called the Noosfera, had been waiting for favorable sea conditions before plowing into the icy waters below the southern tip of South America.
It was late January, and Nolan was headed home after spending three months at Palmer Station, a tiny American research base in Antarctica.
She had been studying the effects of climate change on zooplankton, and, in her spare moments, cheering for her favorite football team, the Buffalo Bills. She wore a beanie with a Bills logo on the front and a blue poof on top when she went out on a boat to collect zooplankton in nets, or hiked the receding glacier behind the station. Her hat alerted two other Bills fans that she was one of them.
In some ways, she did not behave like a typical Bills fan, causing joyful chaos and destruction to celebrate the team.
“We’ll see if Meredith starts diving through tables,” Ricky Robbins, who was there studying seabirds, said in reference to a popular activity among fans at Bills tailgates.
But in one important way, she did.
“Every year I get excited,” Nolan said cheerfully in early November. “But I’m hopeful that this is the year.”
Since the 1950s, the National Science Foundation has funded research projects in Antarctica. Palmer Station, built in 1968, is the smallest of its three stations, housing around 40 people in the summer and about 20 in the winter. It is also the warmest, but that still means below-freezing temperatures and snow, even in the summer. Some of those there, like Nolan, are studying the effects of climate change on the environment. For many, sports are a way to stay linked with the outside world, even when connecting with their teams is a challenge.
Until recently, high-speed internet access was limited, when it was available at all. A participant manual from 2018 cautioned: “Large downloads and streaming media have a negative impact on everyone else.”
Sports fans, then, would save up their internet rations for game times.
In 2013, Ken Halanych, then a professor at Auburn University, was on a ship when Auburn won a game against its hated rival, the University of Alabama, by returning a missed field goal 109 yards for a touchdown as time expired.
Halanych spent four hours uploading a video so he could see the play.
He has been to Antarctica eight times since 2000. In 2004, when Auburn was one of three undefeated teams hoping for a spot in the national championship game, he persuaded the station manager at Palmer Station to let him raise an Auburn flag on the ship.
“I wrote ESPN trying to connect with them and saying, ‘Here’s my vote from Antarctica,’” Halanych said. “ESPN never responded.”
Darren Roberts has gone to Antarctica 13 times. He loves the work, though he recognizes that it can be isolating. Roberts isn’t sure he would still be going if his wife, Megan, weren’t part of his research team. Following the Denver Broncos helps him connect with his brother, who is 13 years older.
“It is really sweet,” Megan Roberts said. “They all really bond, especially over the Broncos, even when we’re in these crazy remote places. It’s amazing to see. He keeps in touch with his family because of what’s going on with the Broncos.”
Darren Roberts would follow Broncos games through a Google graphic that showed a little football on a digital field. Its movements corresponded to what was happening in the game.
But when the Broncos won the Super Bowl in 2016, the couple were on a research ship called the Laurence M. Gould. It was captained by a man named Ernest Stelly, a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
Even though the Cowboys weren’t playing, Stelly pulled the vessel close enough to Palmer Station that it could use the station’s internet to pick up a radio broadcast. The cooks whipped up party snacks, and Stelly hosted a Super Bowl party.
“I remember it was great, like sitting in the dark on the ship listening to the Super Bowl on the bridge,” Roberts said. “And it was really actually very special and kind of a unique thing, especially at that time.
The United States also operates a base at the South Pole, which is much colder but slightly more populous, and an outpost called McMurdo Station, which is south of New Zealand and can support 1,500 residents.
Robbins, who is on the seabirds team with the Robertses, has worked in even more remote locales, which has made it hard for him to follow his favorite teams. He once worked on a small island in Hawaii on which just seven people, including himself, lived. Experiences like that make Antarctica feel “big city almost,” he said.
“Having, like, a galley with chefs and a bedroom and running water and freshwater showers is like, it feels very luxurious,” Robbins said.
The seabird group works out of a small building separate from other scientists. Robbins called it “the birder hut.”
“Darren’s rumor is that we used to be in the big building with an office, but everybody got really sick of smelling penguin poop,” Robbins said.
Work got busier toward the end of their stay, which meant it wasn’t as easy to follow the end of football season. All the birds’ eggs were hatching, and the team had to measure their chicks. The researchers tagged some birds, and removed tags from others, sometimes late at night or early in the morning.
They were out counting penguin colonies and measuring giant petrel chicks when the Broncos lost to the Bills in the playoffs.
Nolan was happy with the outcome of that game. Sports are a bonding point between Nolan and her father, Jim. He is extraordinarily proud that his daughter works in Antarctica, and has grown accustomed to explaining zooplankton to others.
“It’s kind of the bottom of the food chain,” he tells people. “Without zooplankton we’d all be in trouble.”
At home, Meredith lives about 30 minutes away from her parents, as a graduate student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. They love hearing about her work and receiving pictures of penguins via text message.
“She’s an amazing kid,” Jim said.
They text constantly during games, particularly when Jim isn’t too stressed.
In late December, when the Bills played the New York Jets, she was putting krill into bottles to begin an experiment. Jim texted to her that she shouldn’t worry, the game was a blowout. The Bills won, 40-14.
Palmer base now uses the Starlink satellite system for high-speed internet access. In mid-December the satellites began pinging from the United States rather than Chile, which meant YouTube TV was available on the base. Nolan could stream her Bills live.
Jim is a Bills fan because he grew up in upstate New York, and Meredith inherited the condition from him. He lived through decades of disappointment, including four consecutive losses in the Super Bowl. His daughter, 24, has seen less of that.
“She’s a very optimistic person, probably more optimistic than I am,” Jim said. “But sometimes, being a Bills fan, it can be tough.”
The Noosfera finally got clearance to sail away on that Sunday evening last month, minutes before the A.F.C. championship game kicked off. Jim tracked the boat on a site called MarineTraffic.com. He doesn’t worry about Meredith too much, but the Drake Passage, an expanse of sea between Palmer Station and Chile, can have 40-foot waves.
After she settled in, Nolan fired up her iPad and logged into YouTube TV. She sent a photo of the setup to her father — it showed the back of Josh Allen’s head and the score of the game, 21-10, Chiefs. She watched as the Bills attempted a comeback, then lost, 32-29, just one game short of the Super Bowl.
“It was quite a bummer,” Nolan said in a text message as the ship made its way toward the potentially treacherous Drake Passage. She added an emoji of a crying face. “But still a great season!”