Luther vents his spleen against Matt LaFleur, the Packers’ head coach. I empathize. I don’t want the Jaguars’ coach fired — far from it! — but I understand entirely how Luther feels. Since yesterday’s loss to the Bills, I’ve been borderline inconsolable. We won eight games in a row; Trevor Lawrence finally became the player we drafted; we had a home playoff game; we were winning with four minutes left on the clock, and then . . . out. Gone. Over. All those dreams, hopes, delusions. All that camaraderie and gossip. Dead.
Did you notice that word: “we”? My mother makes fun of me for that. “What do you mean, ‘we‘?” she asks. She has lots of questions like that. “Why do you care so much?” she says. “You don’t know any of the players, and you aren’t on the team.” Another of hers: “It’s just a ball. How can you possibly be depressed about what happened to it?”
This is all fair. But I am depressed about what happened to it. Goodness me, I am. Truly, it hurts. I barely slept last night. Instead, I replayed all of the game’s hinge points over and over again. What if we’d kicked the field goal on fourth and one? What if that spot hadn’t been overturned? What if the safety hadn’t been beaten to that pass? What if we’d got a stop in the fourth quarter? We only needed one stop! I even fantasized about things going another way. I replayed throws, but added Jaguars interceptions. I rendered the last play of the game as a 50-yard touchdown pass, instead of a Bills pick. Millions of years of evolution, and I’m using my brain’s imagination for that.
But I love it. I really do. I hate it, too. It makes me elated and frustrated and happy and sad and angry and relieved. I’m interested in it, intellectually. I’m attracted to it, aesthetically. When watching, I’m even — rare for me! — drawn willingly into a mob. Why? It’s just 11 men trying to move a piece of leather up a field. I have some theories about man’s need for tribes, and faux-danger, and war-by-other-means, but I also don’t particularly care. It is what it is. I’m a football fan. I know no other way of being.