Baumgardner: These are not the Same Old Lions. Their owner made sure of it

In the summer of 1999, Dan Campbell climbed into a beat-up truck and drove it more than 1,500 miles to New York for his first NFL job. He was madly in love with football.

In the summer of 1988, Chris Spielman packed all the laundry he could carry into a beat-up truck that was filled with old fast-food wrappers, per legendary Detroit News sports writer Jerry Green, and drove to metro Detroit for his first NFL job. And he was madly in love with football.

In the summer of 1973, Sheila Ford — who has likely never owned a bad-looking truck — graduated from Yale, just five years after the school began accepting women. She wanted nothing more than to work in the NFL, only to be told females needn’t apply. She, too, was madly in love with football.

What, exactly, does it take to fix the unfixable?

For the first time in modern history, the principal owner of the Detroit Lions — this city’s most beloved sports asset (apologies to the Red Wings) — is building the franchise around the only thing that has ever mattered: honesty. In football, honesty equals trust and trust equals love. The unconditional kind.

Detroit is second only to the Arizona Cardinals for the most losses in NFL history, with 702. Yet in August, the Lions announced they had sold out their Ford Field…