Belonging

Up until 1999, when I thought of football, it was more likely to be about the time I lost my shoe playing in the band and marching around the track before our Homecoming game.

In 1999 I met someone who was a huge fan of the St.Louis Rams.  What a team and what a year!  I thought all football was people running the length of the field to make a touchdown, or perhaps throwing the ball halfway there first where it would be adeptly caught.  Kurt Warner and Marshal Faulk became as familiar to me as Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever.

Last year I began to follow the Crimson Tide at the University of Alabama.  Bestest teaches there and his enthusiasm caught me up almost immediately. College football is different than the NFL, but it has an excitement all it's own and if you want to watch it, Bama is one of the best.

My old self would never believe that I was up tonight, groaning and cheering through an agonizing game that was tied up right until the end when LSU was three points ahead until The Tide tied it up again in the last seven seconds.  Then, in overtime, after being reconciled to loosing, we won!

This game was nearly four hours long and they were not fun hours.  One of the announcers equated it with a game in 2011 where sixteen players were later inducted into the NFL, meaning both teams were so good and so evenly matched that it kinda looked like a comedy of errors to me.  Good players were dropping the ball and doing things I've seldom seen them do. It was awful and yet, I couldn't turn off that television and go to bed.

I don't understand how I can feel so happy watching someone else play a game, but I do. It's as if I am part of that team in some way and have achieved a personal triumph.When I was younger I was only interested in Tennis and even then, mostly only if I was playing. Team sports didn't interest me.  The idea that a bunch of other people might rely on me to carry the team forward, or that my mistake could lay them all low, was too terrifying to contemplate.

And the idea that I would care to watch what I could not do, seemed ridiculous.  Perhaps now the fact that I really long to play tennis changes things?  But . . . I think it is more than that.  I think that I enjoy it now because I am familiar with the players and the rules and, too, I am old enough that I can't really play any sport, so the Crimson Tide fills up all these little holes in me and makes me feel like I belong too.

Belonging is nice -- even if it is only in my head.