There is no problem with the NFL front-loading the Packers’ regular season schedule in recent years. Since Aaron Rodgers took over as starter in 2008, Green Bay openers have looked like this:

2008 – A 24-19 win over Minnesota at home on Monday Night Football.

2009 – A 21-15 win over Chicago at home on Sunday Night Football.

2010 – A 27-20 win over Philadelphia on the road late Sunday afternoon, the primetime FOX game.

2011 – A 42-34 win over New Orleans at home on the NFL’s season-opening Thursday night kickoff game.

2012 – A 30-22 loss at home to San Francisco on late Sunday afternoon, the primetime FOX game.

2013 – A 34-28 loss on the road to San Francisco on late Sunday afternoon, the primetime FOX game.

And now 2014 will again start on the NFL’s season-opening Thursday night kickoff bonanza, this time the Packers the visitors to a Super Bowl championship celebration in Seattle. Counting the upcoming season, the Packers haven’t played a “normal” – which we could categorize as a noon kickoff game or one otherwise not spotlighted – Week 1 contest in seven years.

This is not the problem. If you’re looking at throwing a team into challenging conditions either against some of the league’s deadliest opponents or into some of its most brutal cauldrons of football stadiums as a problem, it is so because of recent outcomes, not empty schedules. The problem specifically, then, is how the season openers have turned out in the last two years.

It is nonetheless as daunting a task as a team could ask for to start 2014: to walk into Seattle’s wall of sonic booming screams, facing the generously applied guillotine of a devastatingly destructive defense, on the night they raise their Super Bowl banner, with Pete Carroll at the height of his happy-thoughts sorcery, in the first game of the season, the shortest distance between right here and a meaningful NFL result.

But the challenge is only a bad thing if it doesn’t turn out our way. It certainly felt beforehand like the Packers winning in Philadelphia on opening weekend 2010 would be found money, like any points the Oklahoma City Thunder get from Kendrick Perkins. But afterwards it was a thrilling game that tested and, later, revealed early the resolve of a team that’d drag its injury-riddled self to a Super Bowl title.

After that championship, it certainly appeared as though the voodoo-scary, hyper-explosive Saints on opening night would be about as difficult a way to start a title defense as you could imagine. After that goal-line stand to win in Green Bay, it was the kings staying the kings for another night.

You get the idea. The back-to-back losses to the 49ers to start recent seasons are frustrating even now because they’re cut and mixed hard with playoff defeats and Jim Harbaugh’s grimly NFL-ian take on emoting and fashion. They’re frustrating because San Francisco is a team everyone knows to be a Super Bowl threat, and losing to them seemingly puts the Packers a rung lower on the almighty pecking order of weekly power rankings. They’re frustrating because you wait all winter and spring and summer, wade through the empty noise of the offseason, tricking yourself into treating non-news as news because it’s all you’ve got on this random Tuesday, then Week 1 rolls around and it’s a high profile opponent in front of a national audience. And then it doesn’t work out how you hoped it would for all those months.

Mostly, these losses are frustrating because they’re losses, and losing is losing. There isn’t a cure for that, and the bigger stage only makes the stumble hurt a little more. Because it’s Week 1 there’s plenty of pent-up pressure waiting to split a seam in the sky. But there’s also more than enough time to regain footing, to stumble again, for a season to go off in God knows how many different directions. Nothing gets decided in Week 1 – the NFL season is too strange, always hanging by a thread, to draw much else from a first impression other than that. That doesn’t mean losing the opener feels better or less important at the time.

The wait to that point will always mean Week 1 has the significance and emotion of many months stuffed into those first four quarters. It means, to us, that the weight is justified in the moment since it is beginning to build momentum already now. The concern over Week 1’s difficulty, though, will always and ultimately be judged in the context of the recent past. Right now it seems the season’s start means a hard road for the Packers because, of late, it has been. Or it’s been hard enough for them to not win, at least.

But to think of it another way, by putting them in these spots the league a) knows the Packers are one of the best draws nationwide, and b) they expect something from them. The NFL has to a degree since 2008. This says something huge about the team’s popularity, to be sure, but it also says the Packers, as a football team, are worth those valuable primetime slots in the eyes of the league. That’s the same before the outcome and it stays that way after.

Regardless, though: when it comes to Week 1, when we think about it in December and remember how long ago it was, we just have to hope it is a better memory this time as it fades off into the background of the bigger regular season. It is, after all, worth remembering that this problem of challenge, this instant expectation, is a great position for the Packers to be in. It’s a problem that shouldn’t be taken for granted, and better than the alternative every time.