Parenting & Family Quote by Lorrie Fair

Carolina Blue isn’t just pigment here; it’s a badge people keep trying to confiscate with a Pantone chart. Lorrie Fair’s line captures a familiar sports-world micro-drama: outsiders and rivals “correcting” a team’s identity by insisting the signature color is generic, interchangeable, basically unoriginal. Calling it “really Columbia blue or sky blue” is the petty weapon of fandoms everywhere - an attempt to deflate aura by reducing it to a technicality. It’s the same impulse that shows up when people insist a tradition is “made up” or a rivalry is “overrated.” The goal isn’t accuracy. It’s control.

Fair’s smart move is refusing to take the bait. She acknowledges the ribbing, but she reframes it as social glue rather than threat. “No bad blood” and “kidding…in good fun” is athlete-speak with real cultural work behind it: maintaining cohesion in competitive spaces requires constant boundary-setting between intensity and toxicity. Teammates and opponents will needle you; the question is whether you let that needle become a wound.

There’s also a gendered undertone worth noticing. Women athletes often get policed for being “too emotional” or “too intense,” so declaring the teasing harmless can be both genuine and strategic - a way to protect the locker room narrative from being sensationalized. Fair turns a debate about a shade into a statement about team culture: identity is real because the people living it treat it as real, not because a skeptic can rename it.