A Black Heart
Games like Saturday make you want to not like sports. Sitting amongst 80,000 of your closest friends (or more like 75,000 friends and 5,000 sworn enemies) and then for 59 minutes and 53 seconds believing that the near impossible, or at least the mostly improbable was actually going to happen makes you realize why we watch sports, why we compete, and why we scream for people we don't know but who wear our favorite uniforms or go to our favorite schools. It makes look up at a full moon after four and a half hours of pure sports amazement and realize there is no where else in the entire world that you'd like to be at that moment.
And then that happens.
A 4th and 9. A fumble. A crowd of students running on the field with the clock running out and the scoreboard nearly confirming what you had hoped would happen but were always quietly bracing yourself for the disappointment of it not.
But never did you see it playing out like that.
I don't have any friends left on the team, nor do I have any real affiliation other than standard, non-contributing alumni status. But I can't think of a worse feeling than the minutes after the loss. A collective gasp, a vacuum of air leaving South Bend. Watching the enemy run all over your field and celebrate the miraculous theft of a football game, after getting dominated in nearly every facet of the competition; it makes you want to hate sports. Or remember that the feelings that you were feeling at that very moment, the anger, the heartbreak, the disbelief, that those feelings, and the very opposite of them are why athletics are what's great about our culture.
I, along with CW, don't believe in moral victories. But if there is a moral to any of this, it's just the reconfirmation that sport and athletics has the ability to affect the human condition more than nearly any other event happening today. So whether it's a pushed in, should've been spotted two yards back QB sneak, or a 2 out, 3 run HR by a visitor that's down to it's last out, the emotions of athletics are as American as anything else red, white, and blue.
But it doesn't make it suck any less.
And then that happens.
A 4th and 9. A fumble. A crowd of students running on the field with the clock running out and the scoreboard nearly confirming what you had hoped would happen but were always quietly bracing yourself for the disappointment of it not.
But never did you see it playing out like that.
I don't have any friends left on the team, nor do I have any real affiliation other than standard, non-contributing alumni status. But I can't think of a worse feeling than the minutes after the loss. A collective gasp, a vacuum of air leaving South Bend. Watching the enemy run all over your field and celebrate the miraculous theft of a football game, after getting dominated in nearly every facet of the competition; it makes you want to hate sports. Or remember that the feelings that you were feeling at that very moment, the anger, the heartbreak, the disbelief, that those feelings, and the very opposite of them are why athletics are what's great about our culture.
I, along with CW, don't believe in moral victories. But if there is a moral to any of this, it's just the reconfirmation that sport and athletics has the ability to affect the human condition more than nearly any other event happening today. So whether it's a pushed in, should've been spotted two yards back QB sneak, or a 2 out, 3 run HR by a visitor that's down to it's last out, the emotions of athletics are as American as anything else red, white, and blue.
But it doesn't make it suck any less.
posted by KA at Tuesday, October 18, 2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home