I couldn’t help but laugh at the comical performance of what was allegedly an NFL team donning some silver and black uniforms out there tonight; in part because it was just so silly to watch a bunch of grown men acting like clowns out there, but mostly the laughter was there in order to subside the harsh reality that my team was, for tonight at least, a horrible failure.

It got me to thinking of the ridiculous notion of how emotionally vested one can become in a team of 53-men boys in tights who’ll never acknowledge your existence, to the point where their weekly performance can dictate one’s self-esteem and self-worth; Witness a win and you’ll be on top of the world for a week–suffer through a loss that you had zero part in, and suddenly the days and hours go by ever so slowly.

It’s stupid, but it’s simply a part of human nature.

It applies beyond just the “sport” part of sports then, and is analogous to other parts of our lives too, namely “love”.

Harsh reality: Our lives are to some extent failures and full of shortcomings–full of dreams that never amounted to anything.

Think about it, as a 5-year-old we had the world ahead of us–our dreams were bigger than ever and went beyond reality. But these dreams, whether it be to play in the NFL, be a big time singer/actor, or even something more reasonable, e.g. become a doctor, all either failed, or in the rare cases that they were accomplished, the actual realities of the situation are nothing compared to the dreams we had.

Sure as a kid you can dream of being a doctor in order to help people, but no one kid ever “dreams” of having to deal with the drama of being a doctor–like the stuff you see on E.R. or Grey’s Anatomy, which as I understand it is 100% non-fiction.

As a result of living life as a plain, miserable failure then (which you clearly are if you’ve made it this far), we require external sources in our lives in order to define our self-worth. For some, it’s sports teams, for others, it’s the seeking of a “great love” or a “soul mate” or whatever you want to call it…not that the concept is mutually exclusive of course.

In the case of love then, all too often you see a person get out of a long-term, say 5/6-year relationship, and end up marrying the next person they meet within a short time frame.

Why is this? It’s because that feeling of having that “extension” in their lives, that is to say, their “lover”, was such that it was taken so much for granted, and once it was gone created a tremendously huge void (i just re-read this and it makes no sense and i have no intention to fix it, my apologies)

Rather than take a chance at going through that cycle then, with say a 2, 5, 10 or even 20-year long relationship that will eventually expire, they feel their solution is to get married–which in theory is a life long commitment or security blanket in which they will co-exist with the “better half” of their lives, forever.

The reason

Which brings me back to sports teams then…

The reason that it is so easy and convenient to define ourselves, and as a result our self worth upon a team, is that we know that they’ll (almost) always be there for us. While friends/family/great loves all come and go at some point, your favorite baseball/football/basketball team has (probably) been around for decades, or in some cases centuries, and will be there for many more.  We feel secure knowing that this is a long, long term investment that at some point will pay off greatly, in the form of a championship.

With no threat of being abandoned then, it’s no wonder we continue to ride out the lows and enjoy the highs of random men that we somehow consciously or subconsciously at some point decided would become an extension of us.

Pathetic it is..