A great thing about sports is that it brings fans together, creates rivalries and lets us, as fans, escape reality for just a bit.
Our favorite team and players showcase their talents daily as we cheer them to victory and feel in their defeats.
We gather around the water cooler or in Cyberland to voice our joy and displeasure, and even with bias, we sometimes forget that being a fan is also short for fanatic.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a fanatic as: “an informal
a person who is extremely interested in something, to a degree that some people find unreasonable.”
As fans, we have fallen into those moments. Our team on a long winning streak, our team defeating better teams or the ultimate victory, a championship season. We find ourselves caught up in excitement and building unrealistic expectations.
What I mean by this is when things go south or even sideways, moments where lapses in fundamentals or years of training lapse, where pressure sometimes gets the better of an athlete to where they fail to succeed in a crucial moment or even the expectation of a team performing better than the actuality will allow to be seen.
We start searching for answers and then find ourselves reaching for unrealistic expectations or solutions, something I have labeled as fan-pectations.
I, myself, have done this many times, long before I started writing with the envy of wanting more. We all want our teams to succeed, even beyond reality and the scope of the situation.
I suffered through the Orioles’ 0-21 start in 1988, the former Washington Redskins stretch of 20 years of futility and the Washington Bullets/Wizards continued run of mediocrity.
Through different ownerships, name, logo and coaching changes and even rebuilds, we always believe our team is missing that one piece, that one player or that one prospect that will change everything.
We hold a standard of excellence for our teams that we don’t hold our children or our employees/employers to. We have a separate pedestal that we raise as a shrine to our teams. With memorabilia, special moments we remember and stories of lasting games or plays that will be revered throughout history.
We find ourselves in such an escape of the daily doldrums and ho-hum that we will plan days around a sporting event, plan weeks and months ahead to make sure we can attend a game in person. Even with the rising prices and charges at the stadiums and parking, North American sports leagues continue to set viewership records, take in billions of dollars on tax-exempt agreements, just to bring us excitement.
So the question to all my fellow sports fans is: When do the expectations of our teams become fan-pectations just to find a few hours of bliss before we celebrate into excitement or heartbreak?
It doesn’t make us bad at all. It provides us a passion that others around us may envy, try for and/or maybe even desire. But it’s a passion only we as fans will understand.
In the end, we just want success for our team, from the top one percent of athletes in their collective profession.
We find strangers that become brethren and friends who become rivals, but the one thing we will all share in the end is the joy that being a fanatic allows us to be for a few hours each game.
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