When it's most gratifying to be a fan of a team

Friday 7/19/24

There are two ways, I'd say, that being a fan of a team is most gratifying, with one way being more gratifying than the other.

The first way is when a team is stacked and rolls. The fan knows that having such a team is anything but an everyday (or every-decade, or every-generation) occurrence. It can be a once-in-a-lifetime iteration of that team.

With the Patriots, this went on for about twenty years. Come a Sunday in the fall, you knew it was very likely that Tom Brady was going to throw for 315 yards and three touchdowns and the Patriots would defeat their opponent going away. And if for some reason the game was closer--a thriller--then the Patriots would almost surely find a way to win. They'd make a victory happen.

For many an autumn, that's how it was. Regular. Set your watch to it.

The other way--which I think can be more gratifying--is when your team is over-achieving, doing things that you did not expect them to do. The season for such a team is one of discovery and self-discovery. The team itself figures out what it can be, what it needs to do. It's almost like watching a person grow up or someone fully-grown becoming better at something. You don't know what's going to happen.

We never do with sports. Personally, it borders on the impossible for anything in sports to shock me. I can be surprised, yes, certainly. But I also know that surprises as as much a part of the whole shebang as anything. You may expect surprises in the abstract, as a concept, but they still have kick in their individual reality.

The seasons I've enjoyed the most--or would have, all things being equal, which is to say, if my life was not what it has been for so long now--are the seasons of this second type. Seasons like those had by the 1988 Red Sox (which was really just a hot stretch, but it was very exciting, and the hotness was extreme and came out of nowhere), the 2001 Patriots, and, above al, the 2013 Red Sox, the most admirable team I've ever known in any sport in terms of resilience, strength, doggedness, tirelessness, and who met the moment over the course of a season like no team, in my view, ever has. Not over the course of the entire grind of a season.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, it's always a good time to bring up truths, is it not? It's not like they're perishable. But also because the 2024 Red Sox, who to date have been that kind of gratifying surprise team, get started with the post-All-Star break portion of their season with a tough series against the Dodgers out in LA. It'll be a tall order winning that series, but I'm keen to see if they can do it. I see a team with belief in itself, a manager with belief in his team, guys figuring out what they can do, growing into their individual games. I don't know what's going to happen. But I feel like a lot is possible.

Now, no one likes to think, "There are 157 bad possible things that can happen to me!" but we're talking the good kind of possibilities here--or at worst those concerning outcomes that won't really hurt you--and you can't have too many of type.