I guess it is more than a game

Reports on a waning fandom

A friend recently asked me who my team was, and for the first time in a long time, I hesitated. I haven’t watched a lot of sports in the last year or two what with pandemic-shortened seasons and other more pressing global events, but that wasn’t always the case.

In fact, one of the best things about family vacations to my parents’ home state of Massachusetts was being able to read the Globe’s sports page and get firsthand gripes about the players and teams I was enthralled by before the internet made it easy to be a fan of any team anywhere.

Despite being miles away from the extended family hub, our shared teams were a constant source of conversation with my dad and my cousins and uncles. It felt like a kind of destiny to join the same ranks my grandfathers (not to mention my grandmother, Ted Williams’ #1 fan) had first rooted with generations earlier.

When I later lived in Boston, it felt like the center of the sports universe. The Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox all won championships. It was a run my younger self could only have dreamed, and it was fun while it lasted.

But I don’t live in Boston anymore, and my personal interests have blossomed in other areas like this weekly letter. To be quite honest, we have bigger fish to fry than wondering if the Red Sox’ bullpen will hold up down the stretch.

I do still enjoy a football game that can’t be settled without overtime or the desperate last minute attempt of a hockey team that’s pulled its goalie. I just don’t always have to see it in real-time or have followed an entire season to appreciate the emotion involved in holding up a trophy or representing a nation in front of the world. And the younger me who fought sleep on more than one occasion to see one more pitch or one more pass before being carried to bed wouldn’t believe it.

But he also wouldn’t believe the other ways in which family ties have been forged and deepened off the field. The uncles who send postcards and never fail to let me know when Boston College is in the news for shall we say non-academic reasons. The aunts who keep the family history alive with a photo for every occasion and share their hard-won business advice from years in the trenches. The cousins with kids of their own now wondering which sporting colors the next generation will wear.

The original thread that tied me to that place and those people when it wasn’t so easy to be with those people in that place may have faded, but it’s allowed the other fruits of life to naturally fill the space.