Sports aren’t important. Relative to family, friends, one’s
community, religion, pets, and professional life, the performance of one’s
sports teams really ought not to have a meaningful impact on one’s life. It’s
just a bunch of people moving an object from one place to another using their
hands, feet, or sticks against a bunch of other people trying to steal the
object for themselves. It’s an absurdity that it garners any attention at all.
And yet, sports, in a lot of ways, are everything. They are
a magnet that binds people of a certain affinity together while repelling groups
with different value systems. They allow for the (mostly) healthy release of
tribal energies, enable the resolution of regional rivalries that historically would
have been solved with lots of fires and cannibalism, and create common experiences
among people with widely disparate professions, faiths, and interests.
We dedicate meaningful percentages of our lives to our teams
at games, watching them on TV, following recruiting, drafts, and
trades/transfers. We vent our spleens on message boards, social media, at bars
and tailgates, and in angry emails to GMs/athletic directors. They are deeply
emotional. We share and treasure the moments of transcendence, when our teams
do something we always wanted them to do - for years, every time we get
together. And we commiserate with one another after particularly bad things,
collectively sharing the trauma, comforted that we don’t have to experience that
despair alone.