Today is the day, the day of the game. No, not just the game, the big game. The Super Bowl. The smaller bowls – Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange. The Game 7’s – MLB, NBA, NHL. The Final Four. The World Cup final. The Champions League final. The final day of the Premier League season.
Burrowed deep on the couch, the only things that could disturb you are nuclear holocaust and your wife. Highly-processed snacks? Check. Ice cold light beer? Check. Or, perhaps you are at a bar with your team’s other lovers. Yes, your team has many lovers. But you’re never jealous. You enjoy the camaraderie, you relish it, as this is the only good and moral kind of polyamory – not the Brooklyn variety. You have all come to watch your mistress fight against another harlot, whose own lovers you loathe today. Absolutely loathe. If one were in the bar with you right this second, you would imagine sucker-punching him squarely in the face. You wouldn’t do it, of course – or would you? At best, you’d engage in some slightly mean-spirited trash talk with this rival fan, or maybe throw out the childish but effective British slight, “Wanker.”
Ah, this is the day. This is the day the sports gods have made; let us rejoice. This is the day we exact our revenge. This is the day we win it all. This is what we have been waiting for and working toward for nearly an entire calendar year.
A quarter, a half, a period, three innings into the game, your wife storms in after she hears a guttural scream, fearing you’ve suffered a severe medical emergency. But of course, you’re not having a stroke or heart attack. It’s just that your favorite player has defied physics, the immutable laws of gravity, and, with balletic grace and five-star general-esque composure, pulled off the play of the year in the biggest game of the year.
He did it! He did it! He did it!
You say – scream – to your wife, “Look at this! Look at this! Look. At. This,” and perhaps she shares your enthusiasm, perhaps she fakes it, perhaps she rolls her eyes and goes back to doing whatever she was doing that involved not watching sports and screaming at the TV. But you don’t feel miffed, you can’t feel miffed, because you just witnessed the eighth athletic wonder of the world in a game as crucial as this one, the big one. Things couldn’t be better.
A quarter, a half, a period, three innings later, your wife slowly cracks the door this time. She hears sobs. She’s quietly furious because you neither cried during your wedding nor the first time you watched The Notebook with her. But she knows better not to bring that up, because she is currently witnessing a full-grown man crumpled on the floor amid a sea of empty beer cans and chip bags, in a position best described as fetal, pounding the floor, babbling incoherently about the refs and the play that should have happened but didn’t. She doesn’t console you – at least not yet – and quietly closes the door and pretends she didn’t just see her husband acting like a toddler who was just handed a 10-minute time-out sentence by cruel, heartless mommy.
The season is over. We lost. “Better luck next year!” your wife eventually tells you once you’ve picked yourself off the floor, straightened your spine, and wiped away the tears. You grumble something in response, and though you ought to appreciate her bubbly attitude in this hour of darkness, you think to yourself, She doesn’t get it.
Such is the nature of being a fan. Of wedding yourself to a turbulent minx. Of nurturing a paradoxical relationship that gets sweeter yet more painful with each passing season.
Like loving a person, loving a team carries great risk. Each week during the season, you risk having an entire day ruined, a calm emotional state decimated, and a healthy, in-shape body, to the destructive alcoholic liquids you must consume to cope with crushing defeats and the rollercoaster of emotions. God forbid you risk your relationship with your spouse and family, but this, of course, is no anomaly. If you love someone as well as a team, your heart will be broken somewhere down the road.
But with great risk comes great reward, and the spoils of victory are delicious indeed. A comeback win? Inject it straight into my veins. A mollywhooping of your team’s fiercest rival? Unadulterated bliss. Taking home the silverware in the big game? It’s a rare feeling, this one is, but rare things tend to be the best.
I occasionally hear chatter online that American sports are what gladiator fights and chariot races were to the Romans, as their civilization crumbled all around them. Panem et circenses, as the Latin goes. Bread and circuses.
Even if it were true, why would I care? America has always been one big circus of distraction, and she will carry on, in one form or another, long after this form falls. In the words of D.H. Lawrence, “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
But sports aren’t just bread and circuses; sports are love and heartbreaks. Sports are life. Sports are a bitch. Sports are unfair. Sports are rigged. Sports are beautiful. Sports are destiny. Fate. Written in the stars.
And like fate, I am its humble slave. I am a fan.
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