Vikings superfan Dave "Diggz" Garza has had his game time outfit laid out for days — Under Armour leggings, two sets of long johns, face mask, gloves, boots with two pairs of socks. In all, five layers of insulating protection against Sunday's super freeze.
"It's going to be too cold to be cute," said the vice president of the Viking World Order fan club.
Kristi Etter knows it. The Eden Prairie Vikings fan and blogger will be wrapped in her usual toasty garb of faux fur, insulated boots — and hand warmers stuffed into her bra. "That warms the core right up," she said.
Good thing, too. For the first time in nearly 40 years, when frigid winds last froze the nose hairs of die-hard fans in the east bleachers at Metropolitan Stadium, the Vikings are hosting a playoff game outdoors. With subzero temperatures possible for Sunday's noon kickoff with Seattle at TCF Bank Stadium, the team, its purple-and-gold faithful and the stadium groundskeepers are girding for something hardy Minnesotans used to take for granted: bone-chilling, frozen tundra-embracing playoff football.
At least when it comes to battling the cold — if not the Seahawks — Etter is oozing confidence. She's a Minnesotan, after all.
"We pretty much have it down to a science here after two years [at TCF]," she said, adding that her husband, Gary, is a hunter who is used to sitting for long periods in snow-covered trees. "Heat packs are your friends. Put them in possibly any place you can."
Despite what may come across as a casual attitude by some toward the cold, spending more than 30 years inside the now-demolished Metrodome might have softened even the most frost-hardened Vikings fans before the team moved to "the Bank" last season.
Recognizing that Sunday could be brutally painful, team officials on Thursday announced steps to comfort fans, offering free coffee in the Fan Zone located on Oak Street, free hand warmers at all entry gates and the use of nearby Mariucci Arena as a pregame warming house, starting at 9 a.m.