I do remember one sentence I uttered as I stumbled out of that Super Bowl party: “Well, somebody had to lose.” (It’s an inverse of what I often say when two teams I hate square off: “It’s a pity somebody has to win.”) Whether we realize it or not, every fan of a team that loses is constantly in the process of honing a valuable life skill. To live is to lose — a loved one, a marriage, a job, a sense of identity — and sports are trivial compared with any of that. But sports provide perspective: You think this is bad? C’mon. This is just a game. It gives us a kind of laboratory of loss, a relatively safe arena in which to practice for the losses that really matter.
Even great teams suffer their share of heartbreakers. The Yankees, who’ve won more World Series titles than any other franchise, have given up two devastating walk-off World Series Game 7 hits (in 1960, to Bill Mazeroski and the Pirates, and in 2001, to Luis Gonzalez and the Diamondbacks). Every league has numerous teams and only one of those teams finishes the season on top, which means the fans of every other team form a community of losers, a community that speaks the same language of bad beats, bad hops, bad calls, bad decisions and the all-encompassing bad luck.
As I was grousing ineloquently on social media about my Super Bowl pain, a friend shared this sentiment from A. Bartlett Giamatti, the onetime commissioner of baseball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
He’s talking about baseball, but he could be describing life itself, sweet and far too short. Sports is joy, and pain, and love, and hope and, yes, perhaps above all, loss. And just like life, it keeps us coming back for more despite it all.
If you’re a member of Chiefs Nation, you can celebrate as one. If you’re one of the 49er faithful like me, you can stare into the middle distance together. Being a fan means wearing the colors, knowing the chants, memorizing the numbers. It means being part of a family or maybe part of a cult, which in these fractured times can both feel very appealing. My friend Jason is a Philadelphia native who despises the 49ers and expresses his hatred with an obnoxiousness that only an Eagles fan could muster. But his Eagles lost in last year’s Super Bowl, also to the Chiefs, which means we got hit by the same bus. It brought us together. Our commonality crossed the boundaries of rooting interest. For a moment, we could commiserate before we resumed talking trash.