Kansas City Chiefs fans: Introduce yourselves!

Up the road in St. Joseph, Missouri — where the Kansas City Chiefs are conducting training camp at Missouri Western State University — our favorite NFL team is taking a day off from practice.

But we know that across Kansas City, the Midwest, the United States — and even the rest of the world — excitement about the coming Chiefs season couldn’t be higher.

One year ago, Arrowhead Pride had more than 85,000 followers on Twitter and 144,000 on Facebook. Today, more than 109,000 follow us on Twitter and 154,000 keep up with us on Facebook.

But that’s just social media. We’re closing in on 35,000 user accounts on the site itself, and new ones are opened every single day.

We know, however, that we only hear from a small percentage of the Chiefs fans who come to AP for the latest information.

So today’s the day! Let’s hear from you!

Please... take this opportunity to introduce yourself in the comments. Share your name (even just your first name, if you’d prefer) and how you began following the Chiefs. If you want, share why you picked your username. Who are you? What’s your story? What’s your best Chiefs story? Who’s your all-time favorite player? Why?

Whether you’ve been an AP user for a dozen years or a dozen minutes, tell us something — anything — about yourself.

Today is your day to step up and tell the world that you’re proud to be a Chiefs fan!

Since it’s my turn to write our annual first-off-day-from-training-camp welcome to our readers, I’ll start.

I’m John Dixon. An audio engineer by trade, on most days I serve as your humble AP deputy editor. I grew up in Warrensburg, Missouri — an hour east of Kansas City — where the Chiefs were a big part of our lives. I watched the Chiefs in Super Bowl I (excuse me, the AFL-NFL Championship Game) on a Zenith black-and-white TV. By the time Otis Taylor caught Len Dawson’s pass and juked his way 46 yards down the sideline to ice the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, it was a brand-new Zenith color TV. We were still watching that set on Christmas Day 1971 when our hearts were broken by Garo Yepremian’s 37-yard field goal that ended the longest game in NFL history — just the first of many heartbreaks to come. But through it all, I’ve been a Chiefs fan. Our day would has come.

Now it’s your turn: