A National Football League team.  "I often think about how different things might be here if they had stayed in town," she said.  On Sunday, the Green Bay Packers play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl, and renewed attention will be paid to how the NFL has been such a large factor in putting its smallest member town, Green Bay, Wisconsin, on the map. For generations of Americans, the name Green Bay has equated to big league, because of the Packers and the NFL.  But in the early and struggling days of the NFL, when no one knew that the league would turn into the sports, entertainment and marketing giant it is today, it was not such a rarity for smaller towns to have a team. For four years in the 1930s, the Portsmouth Spartans were full-fledged members of the NFL. The team departed -- it moved to Michigan, where it was renamed the Detroit Lions -- but the stadium remained, and still stands, in a city that sometimes wonders how the course of its fortunes might have varied had it, like Green Bay, managed to stay in the game.  "I played in that stadium," said Portsmouth Mayor David Malone. "After the NFL team left town, the stadium was used for high school football, and it still is. I played safety and wide receiver for Portsmouth High School in the 1970s, but even by then, the Spartans had been gone for a long time, and people didn't talk about them much. We know that something like that will never happen again -- a National Football League team in a small town like ours."
"Sometimes I'll drive by the old stadium," Lisa Carver said, "and it kind of feels like a dream. You can almost hear the cheers from the crowds, even though the place is empty."Carver is the