Super Bowl Sunday is obviously a big day for people who care about Sportsball and even people who have an unnatural fondness for advertising. But for the dog lovers in the area who could otherwise care less about football or Clydesdales, there’s another, much fluffier reason to turn on the TV this weekend. And this year, the Puppy Bowl has some local stars.

For starters, there’s Charlie, a Feist/Whippet mix that apparently made so much of an impression that he’s featured on the main promotional photos on Animal Planet’s website. Charlie was adopted through City Dogs Rescue, a foster based shelter here in the District.

Alexandria-based Operation Paws for Homes, a shelter whose reach extends from Richmond to Pennsylvania, has three dogs that made it into this year’s Puppy Bowl. Samoa, a husky/shepherd mix is on the starting lineup, while his sister, Cream Puff, and a Catahoula/Lab mix named Lotte also went up for filming day.

So how does one get an adorable rescue mutt into the Puppy Bowl? Apparently not with great difficulty. City Dogs’ Executive Director Amy Bandyk said that Animal Planet cast a pretty wide net with their casting call, reaching out to several shelters nationwide. Laurie Landers, a volunteer from Operation Paws for Homes said that this is actually the organization’s second year sending dogs to the Puppy Bowl. Animal Planet had approached founder Jen Dodge at an adoption event two years ago.

Not to spoil the magic for intent puppy viewers, but the Puppy Bowl is not a live event. Charlie, Lotte, Samoa, and Cream Puff went up to New York with their adopters in early October for the filming.

“It was pretty exciting,” said Landers of the experience. “We stayed in a dog friendly hotel. It was crowded. I would say it was a little bit overwhelming for the puppies. Most of these puppies came from places that have land and grass.”

Landers describes the experience as being particularly stressful for Lotte, who had come to her farm in Noakesville, VA from South Carolina as part of a litter of seventeen puppies. Although Lotte is no longer completely feral, Landers and Lotte’s adopter Chelsea Lehman did carry her around from place to place.

“She’s a beautiful dog but on the field I think she just kind of walked around and sniffed a little bit and that was it,” said Landers. “That was actually what most of the dogs did.”

Part of what may have separated Charlie from the crowd was his willingness to play. “His litter mates were all male so he was basically training from birth,” says Bandyk.

Bandyk also suspects that Charlie may get a lot of camera time because of his willingness to rumble with a “confident and goofy sharpei that kind of stole the show. Charlie was one of the only dogs that wasn’t afraid of him.”

City Dog Rescue also took advantage of the proximity to Discovery Channel in Silver Spring to bring some of their other puppies to the limelight. Sebastian, Bassett Hound and Earl Grey, a chihuahua mix, will appear crawling across the anchors’ desk as part of the Puppy Bowl pre-show.

Part of the benefit of Animal Planet using solely rescue dogs is that it highlights the work of local rescues like City Dog Rescue and Operation Paws for Homes. Both of them started up around five years ago, are primarily volunteer run, oth count on foster families rather than a central facility and have grown exponentially. In 2015, Operation Paws for Homes adopted 1200 dogs. Bandyk says that City Dog Rescue planned in its infancy to adopt 35 dogs per year, but has already adopted 90 dogs in the month of January alone.

Charlie’s story is particularly heartwarming, since he was born in a small shelter in Smith County, VA that has a high intake rate and has to make choices about euthanizing dogs. “It is super exciting for us because he was kind of this unwanted puppy from this rural shelter and all of a sudden he’s on this great main stage promoting adoption,” says Bandyk of the chance to share Charlie’s story.

Operation Paws for Homes will be celebrating in a particularly grand fashion at the Jailbreak Brewing Company in Laurel, MD. All three of their star pups will be in attendance but if you want some early footage of Cream Puff and Samoa (now called May and Grayson), their Adoption Tail is featured on Animal Planet’s website. Spoiler alert: you can see Cream Puff riding an altered skateboard.