Notes from a lifetime of caring too much about things I cannot control
My grandfather watched his team lose for 31 years straight before they finally won anything worth talking about.
Thirty-one years. That's not fandom. That's a commitment. That's the kind of loyalty that would be considered unhinged in literally any other context. Imagine being that devoted to a restaurant that kept giving you food poisoning. Imagine going back to the same mechanic who'd never once fixed your car correctly. You wouldn't. You'd leave. You'd find somewhere else to take your money and your heart.
But sports? Sports gets a pass. Sports gets 31 years of your grandfather sitting in the same chair, wearing the same faded jersey that hasn't fit right since the Reagan administration, yelling at a television set like it owes him something.
And when they finally won — and I mean finally, after three decades of almost and not quite and wait til next year — he cried. I watched him cry. Big, embarrassing, shoulder-shaking sobs that he made absolutely no attempt to hide.
That's the contract. That's what you sign up for.
Here's the math that doesn't add up but somehow always does:
One championship erases years of misery. Not immediately — the misery is real while it's happening, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But retrospectively, from the other side of a title, all those losses become the journey. The story that made the ending mean something. The suffering gets recontextualized into narrative scaffolding.
This is either beautiful or insane and I genuinely cannot decide which.
What I know is that if your team handed you championships on a regular basis, with no drama, no heartbreak, no seasons that made you question why you ever started watching in the first place — you'd get bored. You would. Don't make that face. You know it's true.
The fans of historically dominant teams will tell you otherwise. They'll point to their trophy cases with great confidence. But dig a little deeper and what they'll really talk about — what gets them animated — is the close call. The near-miss. The game that should have gone the other way and didn't.
We don't love sports for the certainty. We love it for the knife-edge.
Professional athletes are not like other people. I know that sounds obvious but I don't think we've fully reckoned with what it means.
These are people who decided, somewhere between ages 8 and 14, that they were going to dedicate their existence to one specific physical skill. They restructured their entire lives around it. Sleep schedules. Diets. Relationships that came second, or third, or didn't survive the season. Entire childhoods organized around reps and drills and coaches who pushed them past what they thought they could do.
And then — if everything went right, if the talent was there and the work was there and the injuries stayed away and the timing lined up — they got to do it in front of thousands of screaming strangers who would claim them as their own.
We claim them. We say our quarterback and our striker like we did anything. Like we showed up to a single early morning practice. Like we ran a single route in the cold.
The athletes tolerate this with varying degrees of grace and I think on balance they're being pretty reasonable about it.
What's stranger still is how we turn on them. The same fans who wore their jersey to bed will boo them off the field for one bad game. One fumble. One missed shot in the fourth quarter. The unconditional love of sports fandom has conditions, it turns out, and they are tied directly to performance.
Athletes learn this early. The good ones find a way to play for something other than the crowd's approval, because the crowd's approval is a weather system — beautiful one day, catastrophic the next, and entirely outside anyone's control.
Here's what casual watching misses entirely: sports has layers.
The first layer is the obvious one. Points. Score. Win or lose. This is the layer that makes the highlight reel and satisfies the part of your brain that just wants a resolution.
The second layer is tactics. Why did they run that play? Why did the manager pull the pitcher in the sixth when he was still throwing well? Why is the defense sitting in a zone when man coverage would seem to make more sense here? This is where sports becomes chess, except the chess pieces are sweating and have opinions and sometimes pull hamstrings.
The third layer is the human layer. The player who's been feuding with the coach all season and tonight has to execute his system anyway. The veteran on the last year of her contract playing like it's the last year of her career because it might be. The young guy who grew up watching this team, who had a poster of this stadium on his bedroom wall, who is now walking onto that field and trying very hard not to think about all of that while he performs at the highest level of his sport.
The game is never just the game. It's always carrying all of that weight. The history and the pressure and the story beneath the story. Once you start seeing those layers you can't un-see them, and casual watching becomes impossible, and your viewing companions start to find you a little exhausting.
Worth it.
I want to talk about time because sports does something genuinely strange to it.
Inside a stadium or an arena, time gets elastic. A two-minute drill in football stretches into something that feels much longer, every second bloated with possibility. A cricket match — and I say this with love — exists in its own temporal dimension entirely, one where days pass and the game continues and everyone seems fine with this.
But also: time collapses.
You're sitting in the stands and it's the seventh inning and you realize you haven't checked your phone in two hours and you haven't thought about your inbox or your rent or that conversation you should have had with your sister. For two hours, your brain was fully occupied by something that was happening right now, in front of you, requiring your full attention.
This is rarer than it should be. This is, in the age of notifications and second screens and the constant hum of everything demanding a piece of you, genuinely hard to find.
Sports gives it to you for free with the price of a ticket. Or for the cost of a cable subscription. Or just by showing up to the park where the local kids are playing on a Saturday morning, where nobody's getting paid and the stakes are objectively low and somehow it still pulls you in.
The present tense. Sports deals exclusively in the present tense.
Here's the article nobody writes enough: the almost-athletes.
The kid who was the best player on every team they were ever on, right up until the level where everyone was that kid. The collegiate athlete who had the skills but not quite the size, or the speed, or the one specific thing that separated good from elite. The professional who made it to the league and rode the bench and got released and tried one more team and then quietly retired at 27 and went back home.
They played sports at levels most people will never reach. They dedicated years to something and came closer than almost anyone. And then it was over and they had to figure out what came next.
There's something in those stories that cuts closer to the bone than the championships. Because most of us are not champions. Most of us are people who wanted something very badly, worked hard for it, and still didn't quite get there. The almost-athlete isn't a failure — they're just the story of human effort told without a fairytale ending.
Sports is full of those stories. Quietly full of them. They run parallel to the highlight reels, in the dark.
It's Tuesday. The season's over. Your team finished third and the playoffs were someone else's story this year. The stadium is quiet. The roster's being shuffled. The long offseason stretches ahead like a sentence to be served.
And already — already — there's something stirring. A trade rumor. A draft prospect. A new coach who might change everything. An article about training camp. A prediction about next year.
You're reading it. I don't even need to tell you — you're already reading it.
Because hope is not a choice in sports. It's not something you decide to feel. It just shows up, stubborn and irrational and wearing last year's colors, insisting that this time it's going to be different.
Maybe it will be.
Probably it won't.
Definitely you're watching anyway.
For my grandfather, who taught me that thirty-one years is not too long to wait for something you love.