A note on sports and heartbreak
By 
First, just a technical point about the end of the UCONN-Duike game: I disagree with the claim that a lot of people were making, in the immediate aftermath of the game, that Cayden Boozer should have just held the ball rather than trying to pass.
If you watch the play, which I’ve done a few times now for the sake of Science ™, Duke has two players at the UCONN end of the court with no UCONN player within 50 feet of them. If Boozer simply gets the ball over the two UCONN players who are a good six feet in front of him — something that he’s going to manage to do 98% of the time in that sort of situation — the game is OVER. Then what people would be talking about would be Hurley’s terrible coaching decision not to foul with two chances to do so in the backcourt, especially given that Duke was in the one and one and there would have been around nine seconds to go if they had fouled on the first trap double team.
What happened was a wildly improbable turnover, followed by a 35-foot shot that that kid makes maybe 10%-15% of the time. When Cayden Boozer started to throw that pass Duke’s odds of winning must have been around 99.5% in other words. So saying he made a mistake by not holding the ball is pure hindsight bias.
What struck me about that whole ending though was the 12-year-old kid out there, or actually thousands of them, that will spend the rest of his life haunted by that play. All the good things that will happen to him from now on will always have a tiny shadow lurking in the background . . . “But if Cayden’s pass had just been six inches higher . . .”
It’s crazy but that’s how it works.
The tenderness of youth ensured that the Ohio State games of the mid-1970s will remain the deepest scars of my fandom, but memory allows other limbless monsters of pain to unfold themselves, any time I fall into the sort of masochistic reverie that any deeply engaged fan will recognize.
For example, take the 2015 Michigan State game. Michigan had the ball and the lead with ten seconds left, in Michigan State territory. Ten seconds! I was yelling at the TV – just snap the ball and run around for a bit! I mean how hard can that be? But no: Jim Harbaugh decides to play it “safe” by punting. Because Michigan State players are a bunch of thugs who could never get into Michigan, one of them – totally illegally I might and will add – slaps Michigan’s center in the head as he’s snapping the ball, leading to a bad snap that bounces on the ground in front of our punter, who is from Australia and doesn’t really understand the rules of American football apparently. (He has been brought onto the team to be a newfangled Australian Rules Football-type punter, who scurries toward the sideline and delivers a rugby-style kick. This is supposed to be more effective than the traditional punting style, and our innovative coach decides to innovate in this ultimately fatal way).
Anyway, all the punter has to do is fall on the ball. If he does, then the worst-case scenario, assuming time doesn’t actually expire before the end of this play, is that MSU gets the ball at midfield with time for a Hail Mary pass to the end zone (probability of success: approximately two percent). But no: the punter – I’m actually blocking his name out at the moment – O’Neill? Or am I confusing him with the O’Neal from the 1975 OSU game? – suddenly starts acting like he’s a fan who came down from the stands after winning some sort of contest to participate in one play in a major college football game. In a spastic panic, he attempts to kick the ball, even as he’s being overwhelmed by waves of Spartans, in a sort of reverse Thermopylae.
Of course the kick is blocked, and, following the inexorable logic of certain nightmares, it bounces at just the right angle into the arms of the one MSU player who is in position to run unimpeded toward the Michigan end zone. I keep thinking that maybe he’ll miraculously fall down, or an asteroid or an ICBM will strike the stadium in the next five seconds, but none of these things end up happening. Afterwards, Michigan State’s coach, the intolerable Mark Dantonio – a person whose visage at all times and in every circumstance is that of a man undergoing a colonoscopy – actually runs to the base of the Michigan student section, and starts taunting the crowd. In yet another gross injustice from that miserable afternoon, he is not immediately lynched.
Or consider the 1994 Colorado game. By that time I had been on the Colorado faculty for several years, but this of course didn’t make the slightest difference to my college football loyalties, which could not be affected by something as trivial as my professional identity. This time, there are six seconds left. For the last two minutes of the game – this is in football time, in astronomical time this interval took many agonizing minutes to play – I have been calculating exactly how long Colorado will have to score a touchdown if they get the ball back. The answer turns out to be six seconds. Surely their quarterback, Kordell Stewart, cannot throw the ball the 70 yards in the air that will be required to get the ball to the end zone on the game’s last play? He can. The ball hangs in the air for what seems like approximately half an hour, and, during this time, I suddenly have a strangely serene, almost Zen-like sense that it’s going to be caught by a Colorado receiver. Michael Westbrook, a Detroit native (traitor) does catch it, with future NFL Hall of Fame cornerback Ty Law hanging desperately onto his shoulders.
I’m sitting in front of the TV in Boulder, and, within three seconds of the catch, I have turned it off. I then do something that would be impossible to do now, twenty-seven years later: I go into a complete information blackout. For days, I do not look at a television or a newspaper. (The Internet, let alone social media, doesn’t really exist yet). Through heroic self-discipline, I manage to go more than a year before ever seeing a replay of this event, even though the play had surely by then been rebroadcast hundreds of times on local and national media.
Indeed, so thoroughly do I manage to avoid any re-living of this event that it becomes in some way fundamentally unreal to me – so much so that, the next summer, I have an uncanny experience on the Boulder campus. I’m walking to the main library, and I notice that a student walking in the opposite direction is wearing a T-shirt featuring an image of Kordell Stewart, and the words, “Trailing 26-21, six seconds to go, 70 yards from the end zone, no problem.” For a couple of seconds I have an indescribably eerie sensation that this T-shirt is somehow describing a nightmare I once had. Only then do I remember the truth I have so successfully repressed.
Today, in the age of the Internet, this story could never happen. 25 years ago, I had the option of suffering alone, and pretending to myself that the catastrophe I had just witnessed was something that I could choose to ignore. Today, deeply engaged fans cannot really choose to be alone: the Internet is always there, irresistibly beckoning, making a psychological offer that we can’t refuse. Even – indeed especially – the most excruciating losses must immediately be re-lived, re-litigated, and essentially experienced over and over again, in some perverse cyber-version of the Hindu or Nietzschean cycle of eternal return. (Perhaps for my sins I will be reincarnated as a Cleveland Browns fan).
From A Fan’s Life