the agony and the ecstasy

on the roller coaster ride of being a sports fan

Being a sports fan is a peculiar thing. We put ourselves out there, opening our hearts and minds, making ourselves vulnerable, as in any relationship. We accept the fact that the teams we love will eventually break our heart. We know it’s not always a feel-good scenario when you love sports. But we dive in anyhow. Because when sports are feel-good, they are spectacular.

I watch sports in part because I grew up in a house where baseball (Yankees and Mets) and football (Jets) seemed to be on all the time. Later, hockey was added to the mix and I became a rabid Islanders fan. We watched hockey as a family, baseball was watched with my mother.

I learned early on about the yin and yang of being a sports fan. There are moments of exhilaration, there are moments when you feel the tears of disappointment well up in your eyes. We come to sports for the joy, for the excitement. We don’t come for the pain. Yet it’s there, waiting, and no matter which team you are a fan of, the pain will come more often than the joy. Seasons are long and unforgiving. A team can start off on an amazing high and sink into a low without warning. You’ll feel myriad emotions during the course of a season; happiness, elation, anger, sadness. You might throw a slipper at the television, you might spend your night cursing at people who can’t hear you, you might shout with a joy so exuberant the neighbors here you. It’s all part of being a sports fan. We know going in that there is the potential for utter disappointment, we know that the odds are always against us.

Yet we watch. We go to games, we watch and listen, we wear the jerseys and buy the tv packages and watch Sportscenter until our eyes bleed. We check the box scores and league standings and we do the math in our head to see how many days it is until our team is eliminated and we begin the process of feeling that connected loss all over again.

Oh, sure, being a sports fan can be good. There are winning seasons and championships and well played games. There’s exaltation and heart swelling pride and tears of joy. But only one team in each sport can be champion in a season, so that leaves a lot of room for dejection and sadness. Sports is a losing proposition, mostly, and because we come to identify with our favorite teams as if they were part of us, as if we are part of them, we feel each loss on a personal level. When we say “we lost tonight,” we are making ourselves a part of that loss. We grieve when our teams move. We mourn when a favorite player is traded. We feel the losses in our souls, especially the big losses. And in a way, they’re all big because each subsequent loss in a season leads to the likelihood that you won’t see the postseason.

But oh, that joy. I will never forget being in the Nassau Coliseum when the Islanders won their second Stanley Cup. It was a high I’ve never replicated. Being with other fans, high fiving, hugging, screaming, watching my heroes skate around the ice with cup aloft, it was pure ecstasy. We gathered after the game on Hempstead Turnpike, thousands of us taking over the streets, shouting, partying, feeling nothing but elation. Our team won. And isn’t that what it’s all about, being a sports fan? It’s about the winning, the championship.

Sports fans live and die with their teams, figuratively. When they win, we’re on top of the world. We proudly wear our hoodies, put the stickers on our cars, talk to our coworkers about what a great season it’s been. When our teams are losing, we’re sullen about it, we gather at the water cooler and talk about firing the coach, about which players are dealing us the most pain. Sports gives us something to talk about, gives us a shared pleasure as well as a shared pain. We make friends in fandom, we find camaraderie in discussing scores and trades.

We establish this relationship with players, with our teams, with sports as a whole, and like any other relationship it has its peaks and valleys. Learning to navigate that relationship and keep it wholesome and healthy is a trying endeavor. We want to get mad, we want to lash out. We want to hug every stranger we see wearing our team’s logo. Most of us keep it even keeled, and refrain from being too rabid about it. We tell ourselves after a loss, it’s only sports. It’s only a game. Sometimes though it is so much more. It’s part of us. It’s in our hearts, and we know our hearts can be broken by these games.

We subject ourselves to this. We do it willingly. We accept the defeats as part of being a sports fan, but acceptance doesn’t make them any more palatable. We stare at the final score as if it couldn’t be real, our team didn’t let us down again, did they? We put the jerseys away, we swear off the team, the league, sports in general, but that only last days until we’re in front of the tv again, cursing, screaming, shaking our heads. Our hearts will break. Our souls will hurt. We may cry. And we’ll do it all again and again because we’re stupidly devoted to this extension of ourselves that is our favorite sports team.

May your teams bring you joy. Unless they are playing mine.