The thrill of victory...the agony of defeat

!@#!ing Mariners losing 3 in a row upsets me though. Less upsetting than football though, since there are a zillion more games.

This was a quote from Erik, who I am going to say is new to passionate sports following (to be fair) but is picking it up like a seasoned veteran. For those that have never followed sports, you will never really understand the pain of losing, but I am going to try and explain it. A certain genius named Bill Simmons once devised the 13 levels of losing (omg hyperlink! click to read the article about the 13 levels!) and what my good friend Erik is going through is what we'd like to call the "Achilles Heel" loss, which is essentially a series or game in which you find out something wrong with your team. In our case, we're finding out that the Seattle Mariners are secretly not that good at offense, after watching them rattle off 5 losses in a row, including both sides of a double header today. I'm sorry Erik, its true. We aren't that good offensively.

No less, back to the point, I've mentioned this before in here in reference to Bill Simmons most excellent book Now I Can Die in Peace, but I will go into a bit more detail. In 2001-2002, the New England Patriots were a bit of a Cinderella team in the playoffs. To the casual fan, they seem like the type you wouldn't put a ton of stock in. Well, as a Patriots fan, I was pretty much putting the entirety of my soul into believing in them. Well when they were playing the Oakland Raiders in the divisional playoffs, they pretty much lost. Tom Brady fumbled the ball in the snow and it looked like the game was over. I felt like dying. I was sitting in my room with Erik, Brian, and our old friend Jackie Jones, and they were all wondering why I was so distraught. The New England Patriots lost and they would not be making the Super Bowl, to atone for the horrible defeat at the demonic Green Bay Packers in the 1997 Super Bowl. This was what we would call a stomach punch game. My team was driving, down by 3, and then they were done.

Except they weren't.

The Patriots survived because of the "Tuck rule," an infamous rule that turned Brady's fumble into an incomplete pass, even though it wasn't one really. I was overjoyed. It was overturned, and the Patriots would continue on to the next round, no stomach punch and our Super Bowl hopes in tact. The point is, nothing can change as quickly as sports. You can be on top one second, and then you can be at the bottom, just by a simple ruling by a referee (I'm looking at you Tim Donaghy).

What I was feeling before the call was overturned could best be described as the combination of an inexplicable desire to cry like a small child who has a severely skinned knee with the need to collapse from heart attack symptoms. It did not feel good. It felt like death mixed with you finding out someone else was dying. Now this may seem like a terribly insensitive analogy, but its pretty much what it is. Well this time, instead of me the Raiders fans got to feel that. Suck it Raiders fans! If you're truly passionate about a sports team, you go through this all the time. It is sort of like a relationship with the opposite sex, if everything is going well, you feel like you are on the top of the world...if it isn't you cannot stop thinking about "what went wrong."

The amazing thing about sports is that so many people in the world are so into them, when its essentially an eternity of lows combined with the fleeting hours of the highs. Look at the Mariners...2001 we won 116 games. Last year we weren't even a .500 club, and that was a good year! This year, we're teasing as a contender, but are we really one? Sometimes I'm envious of fans of teams like the Cleveland Browns or the Atlanta Hawks. Sure, they always suck (ALWAYS!) but at least they don't know what it's like to be a real winner. When you win 3 out of 4 Super Bowls and then come one Peyton Face away from going to another Super Bowl to play a team you already clobbered earlier in the season, you feel terrible. You could have had that again. It could have been yours. Instead, there I was...not answering my phone and refusing to go online, not being able to accept that my team, the New England Patriots, had just lost to the dreaded Indianapolis Colts.

The moral of this story is, to those out there who cannot comprehend why someone they know is freaking out about a game, think about the times where you are completely unreasonable about ridiculous things. Everyone has their own version of this, its just much more well known for people to do this about sports. Think about it, and understand...but whatever you do, never say these four words. There's always next year. No one ever wants to hear that.

Unless you are the Pats. 16-0 baby!

And to Erik and others who may be new to the feeling, it is a good thing. That means your team is doing well enough to make you feel terrible...which is strangely a good thing. Who decides these things? Sports are weird. Maybe it is just a temporary form of insanity, but this is coming from the guy who watches his Fantasy Baseball team every day and talks at least 2 to 3 hours of it daily as well. If it's temporary, then I must have gotten a really, really bad case of it.