Putting my own personal thoughts into our class’s commencement issue was really difficult for me. Maybe it was because I used up a lot of my best thoughts on the last two classes that graduated. Maybe it’s because it’s more difficult to write to a group of people making a life-changing step when you are as well. Or maybe I was just suffering from a nasty case of senioritis.
Whatever the case, I finally did find inspiration from perhaps the most unlikely of places.
My senior week had begun, and I found myself a bit down in the dumps. I had already said goodbye to many of my closest friends who wouldn’t be making the graduation trip quite yet, and felt I was being rushed through the motions of being cut off from this institution and these people.
I suddenly found myself on a couch in a semi-crowded suite with Game 6 of the NHL series between the Bruins and the Maple Leafs set to start. I wouldn’t say the room was a typical sports fandom — outside of one or two diehards, some of the people might watch 10 sporting events in a calendar year — but it reminded me of a valuable lesson in being a sports fan.
Fandom is not just about your connection to a team, but about the link you form with each and every person who invests in a game, regardless of where they came from or where they are going after.
You see, hockey is not my favorite sport — it might not even crack my top five. And outside of a general rooting interest towards Boston fan suffering, my care about the actual results was minimal.
But as a group, we became engrossed.
What was expected to be a period’s worth of watching hockey became three. Getting ready was done in front of the television instead of in bedrooms. There was yelling and screaming every other second as the game remained competitive until the bitter end.
By the end of the game, I felt refreshed. After a long day of feeling down, something about getting together with others to watch and talk sports made everything feel right again.
I flashed back to other moments — my friends piling on each other on the couch when Donovan scored to beat Algeria, the Daily office in silence as seconds ticked down on last year’s NFC championship game, the Everton games I’d watched in crowded pubs — and realized that beyond being a huge part of my life, they had become a significant part of my social life as well.
Soon enough, we’ll all be out in the real world. We won’t have our extracurriculars to talk about anymore, and we probably won’t want to talk about our jobs after spending 40 hours a week at them.
But sitting down to watch a sporting event takes no major investment. It provides the perfect complement to catching up or the perfect catalyst for a conversation with someone with whom you might have lost touch.
I’m not saying that everyone should jump up and become as hardcore of a sports fan as I am. But I am saying that outside of death and taxes, there aren’t many things as certain as sports. And as our lives transition, as we are forced into new cities and new circles, there will always be a sporting event on at the same time every night of every year, and a bar full of sports fans ready to welcome us and make us feel at home.
Sports aren’t omnipotent, but their presence in our culture is undoubtedly powerful. So give watching with friends, or even strangers, a try. You might just surprise yourself.
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Ethan Sturm graduates today with a degree in biology-psychology. He can be reached at Ethan.Sturm@gmail.com.
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