Sports fans, local teams, and the personal pronoun "we".

   When my wife and I first moved to San Francisco, our home for the past decade, I never imagined that it was a city where sports would be so heralded. The natural beauty of the place, it's history as being a welcoming place to the LGBT community, and it's reputation for progressive politics gave me the impression that professional sports would not capture the interest of the people here on a wide scale. I was wrong.
   It's true that over the past few years there have been three bay area teams that have either won or nearly won their sport's respective championship title, but I still find the excitement and sustained interest difficult to comprehend. Perhaps it was the same way in New York when I lived there and the Yankees baseball team and Giants football team were both winning, but I don't remember it that way now.
   Many times I've heard people talk about one of the local teams and have noticed the word "we" used in the sentence, such as 'we should have won last night' or the like. It could be that there is nothing particularly novel in this usage, that I just never noticed it when used by people in reference to their favorite teams, but it certainly never registered with me.
   When I hear someone using the plural form when speaking about a particular play, score or whatever, I can hardly contain myself from asking the speaker if they are on the team they are speaking of. I mean this in a tongue-in-cheek way, of course, but there is a part of me that is genuinely perplexed. As I think about it now, I wonder who it was that first employed this form as a technique for feeling included in their team's plight. it's an interesting trope.
   Surely, a sports team relies on their fans as a whole to support them financially (money made from ticket sales, the purchasing of authorized merchandise, etc.), but I am disturbed by this idea, ridiculous and obvious as it may seem; the fans probably know quite a bit about the athletes, but the athletes most likely know nothing about the fans. One group knows the other's names, the other does not.
   So while it's apparent that only one group is in the public eye, the unevenness of the relationship bothers me, and is in my opinion not deserving of the word "we" in referencing it.