Fandom: Why Do We Care About This Nonsense?

Apr 28, 2014; Columbus, OH, USA; Columbus Blue Jackets fans react after their team

The world is a rough place. Politics aside, everyone goes through heartbreak, rough patches, failures, death and the like. Life isn’t Full House, Saved By the Bell, Family Matters or any of the many shows we grew up with, not everyone pops out with an innocent “Did I do that?” to make everything seem forgiven. It can make us feel helpless, voiceless, frightened, confused and a 1,000 more uncomfortable adjectives that sneak into our lives at any given moment,often at the times when we feel we can’t handle anymore. When everything spirals down we feel alone, hurt and lost. What do we turn to? For some it’s religion, family, friends, support groups or our hobbies to bring us up from our slump. We need something. Anything that will transform the hell we find ourselves in, into something far more manageable.

Many of us grew up with sports, like a one sided long distance family member, who is always there but our interaction is minimal. And when we finally get that in person experience, it evolves like a vacation far more magical than anything we feel past our teenage years. We love, we love, we care, we root, we feel the heartbreak inside when they don’t succeed or when our star player goes down at the most inopportune time because the tall Hanson brother from Gonzaga pulled out his arm in a “basketball play.” But there’s always a buffer. It can’t rip our heart like an actual family member could or when the city streets outside don’t have the same mystic innocence we saw going to the game as a kid when heaven couldn’t touch the glow of Nationwide Arena on a gameday. It’s that safe distance of caring and admiration that makes sports the ultimate getaway. You can still engage, you can still care, but even at it’s darkest days, it doesn’t devastate you the way life can. If you believe it can, you’ve got a lot of living left to experience.

Sports are perfect, they really are and no amount of screw-ups, money and greed can take that away from the game, the pureness and quality always shine through. Think of all the life lessons this great thing teaches us.

Social Interaction

Even in today’s obsessive cell phone days, social interaction is the pinnacle of life. I don’t mean commenting on statuses, posting pictures of food or selfies. I mean being at the stadium and embracing in that love of the game. Outside of the arena, you can fight tooth and nail about all the issues that has this world coming to battle at any given moment. But for those 3 hours, you’re embraced in the will of the team. Nothing matters but putting that puck in the net. You connect with someone new. Your hockey love takes on a new shape as you have someone as passionate as you to experience with. Maybe your significant other just can’t get to that level of excitement but this person gets you. They get what it’s like to live and die on kicking out on a penalty kill with 3 minutes remaining in a 2-1 game. Even for a moment so slightly, you become friends with people you’ve never met, will never see again but for that moment you guys are best buddies that won’t stop till that final horn.

Adversity

Just like in life, in sports you’ll have to overcome adversity. Things won’t go the way you want or expect and you’ll have to adjust, you have no choice but to. Your favorite team can lose heartbreakingly in the 3OT after an impressive struggle just to match the Goliath but…you’ll walk away proud. You’ll be so proud to call them your team. Why, they’re losers? Because they fought with reckless abandon, gave every last ounce of energy and then some just to win a game. A game that might not be remembered by most in as little as a week. You learn to adapt. You learn to appreciate the small miracles (NSFW-language-link), you learn to appreciate what others do for you and how hard people sometimes work to make something happen for you…even if they don’t succeed. It’s here that the biggest impression and impact of caring isn’t that they won…it’s that they died trying. That can be far more admirable than an easy win. But man the loss will sting…until you realize you get another chance. As long as you keep getting back up, you have a shot. It’s ingrained in you. The never say die attitude. Then it crosses over and you never say die. When you bomb a presentation, when the date doesn’t go according to plan (or they swipe left), when you lose your job or never get the job to begin with….You get back up. Then you get back up and you get back up and you never stay down because you know that’s not an option. As long as you’re around you’ll get back up because you believe it’ll work this time. No matter the odds stacked against you, you believe this is your time to shine. You’re going into it knowing it doesn’t look great but damnit you’re rooting and giving it all because you have…hope.

Hope

We all hope. We believe every year our team can turn it around. If this goes our way or Player X doesn’t go down we’ve got this and this is the year it all turns around for us. The off-season is the showcase of that hope, when everything looks great and you’re bound to no failure (“The NHL Draft is the Mean Girls of Lindsay Lohan movies.”). It’s like being a kid all over again when the world can be anything you make it to be and you’re destined to rule the world…before the brutal reality busts into your dreams and explains how you have to pass through these hoops, then do this and that, and sleep 5 minutes a day while you slam as much espresso as possible running from class to job to class to extra curricular to friends because what does it all matter if you’re experiencing it alone. We believe because we were born to believe…we watched sports. Sports taught us there’s no such thing as a definite outcome. Hockey itself owns the patent on the Miracle Game. Anything can happen. A #1 seed can go down to a team that just barely made the playoffs. The powerhouse will be blindsided by a team on their 3rd string quarterback….twice. You never turn your tv off during the 3rd period, even down 5-0 to a team stacked with two of the greatest players to ever play the game. They don’t quit and they inspire us to always hope, to always go into every scenario with a chance (so you’re telling me there’s a chance). Which in return builds…

Loyalty

In all of this we learn loyalty. We learn to accept faults, to appreciate the effort and not always the outcome, we learn to hope that tomorrow will be a better day and most importantly, that losing with yours is better than winning with theirs. No one can talk garbage about our team except our own. We’re protective. We know our words come from a place of love with our inspirational “you sucks!” It’s ok, because we always know there’s a respect to it, there’s a power of connection. We’ve been through so much together and I know I’ll never leave no matter how many times I say…”Alright, I’m done.” “Now I’m finally done.” “I know I’ve said this before but this time I mean it, I’m gone.” “No Seriously, I’m effing gone.” “Ok I love you again can we please put pucks in net again together…” We learn to embrace our own and love even if there’s faults because we all know the struggle. We all struggle at times. Maybe it’s not making an accurate pass or stopping pucks…but we all struggle. We can relate to that and we love to see the struggle toppled because it gives us hope in our own. We all bond together to ride the Zamboni through the ups and downs, through the tunnels of failures and deep into the dark unknown times until we see the light breaking at the end of the rebuilding tunnel. We’re in together. Loyalty, Hope and Adversity are character building traits that define and push us through. But none of it matters without our social interactions. There’s no electricity between one circuit. The world becomes alive when we’re together.

I’m not encouraging you to shun the world’s issues, or be lost in the ongoing life struggles. I just like to point out that it’s not all darkness around the world. We do have our similarities, maybe as little as they are, as we all come together to be human beings in this great journey we call life. You may not know that person, but maybe he/she is a hockey fan, something that’s a bit of a niche club here in America. Maybe inside Nationwide Arena you’d have a beer together and talk about how Crosby is a choke artist or how the Blue Jackets’ blueline unit needs to step up it’s game if it wants to be taken seriously as a Cup Contender. Just maybe for that brief moment of this elongated life that never seems as long as the years seem to imply, you’re buddies in unison chanting “We Are the 5th Line!”