Win or lose, together

A few weeks into the 2012 baseball season, I explored the idea of choosing your allegiance as far as sports teams go. It's important to note that this post was in the middle of a crisis that I was having about our beloved Red Sox and the mess that was the 69-93 campaign in 2012. A couple of months back, I blogged about the 2013 Red Sox and how this may have been the most fun team I've ever followed. So I ask myself (and you, dear reader) the question, why do we like certain sports teams?

Above all, what I think the end of the line is for reasons we like sports teams is that it feels good. The journey that we take may be different, but the end destination is the same - we like a given sports team because it feels good to do so. Now, to keep breaking it down...why does it feel good? The next step for me would be winning - if you were taking a random sample of 500 NCAA men's basketball fans, I'm guessing that no more than one of those people is a fan of Grambling University, the team who went 0-28 in the 2012-13 season, losing all but one game by double-digits. Winning makes sense, but plenty of people hate teams who win (see: New York Yankees, New England Patriots, Duke Blue Devils). Regionally, I made the claim in my first link in this post that we grow up in the same city in which a lot of our favorites sports teams play. But I'm a huge fan of Duke basketball, so where did that come from? Some number of years ago (I think 2003) I saw Duke on TV and saw the Cameron Crazies going absolutely nuts and thought hey, that's pretty awesome. Turns out the team played (and still plays) really good basketball, had (and still has) one of the greatest coaches in history, and was straight-up fun to watch. I enjoyed watching Duke basketball because I felt that I was there. I loved the 2013 Red Sox because I felt that I was a part of the team, that this World Series win was as much mine as it was anyone else's in the city of Boston.

The difference between teams you like and teams you love is that you feel that you're a part of the team, that you have a vested interest in the outcome of every game. In the past two Patriots seasons, we've seen losses in the AFC Championship and in the Super Bowl. I got over those two losses in a combined five minutes. But when Duke gets knocked out of the NCAA Tournament, or the Red Sox miss out on the playoffs, it's a lot worse. That being said, it's also much better on the other side (three World Series championships, and an NCAA Championship in 2010 for Duke). So anecdotally, the reason I love the sports teams I do is because I feel like I'm part of the team, that we win and we lose together. (One really cool phenomena is when "we win," but "they lost." Tell people about the most recent game your favorite team played, and if they won, see how often you use "we." If they lost, see if you cut ties from the team.)

My high school basketball team always broke huddles in practice, timeouts, whatever, with "win or lose" from the coach and "together" by the team. I think that's a fitting theme to this post and title, because with your favorite teams, it's win or lose, together.