Earlier this year I posed a question that garnered a slight chuckle on an Arsecast Extra, about what feel like the rising stakes of title races as one gets older. I posited that as the years go by – and if you are inclined to focus on the days that remain for oneself in this mortal coil – the chase for top of the league takes on more import, there is more riding on such a pursuit. The days are numbered.
My speculation is rooted in a personal response to this situation. I’m getting older. I’m in my mid-50s. I’ve been following all sorts of organized professional sports since I was basically able to walk, and some of my earliest memories and formative moments of my youth are sports-centric. Meeting Carl Yastrzemski on the field at Fenway Park when I was 5. Being there for a Brad Park OT game seven winner against the Buffalo Sabres at the old Boston Garden with my dad at 14. Blind, but rabid devotion to the Boston teams followed me through my young adulthood and then Arsenal, somewhat randomly, followed in 1998/1999.
I watched every game of every team I supported that I could, whether broadcast on local cable or by trekking in on the T during high school to get a cheap bleacher seat at Fenway. I was lucky to see three Celtics titles by the time I was 18, though all my other teams were either capped in their ambition, pathetic, tragic, or a lethal combo of all three. Nonetheless I knew what it was like to go to a parade, to root for the best player on the planet – one who could also back up his braggadocio (Moses does eat shit, for those who may have forgotten). I was heartbroken by other failures but never felt deprived of that experience which we all crave: to feel the pride of rooting for the proven best, to have at least a year of bragging rights.
Last year and this year have thus been very interesting for me, as I start to think about what’s left. It’s not that I am consumed by my age or fatalistic or anything like that. I’m generally a pretty optimistic person who likes to enjoy myself and keeps what I think is a healthy perspective on many things – including not worrying about how it all ends. But then there’s the small issue of the math.
When you are 18 if your team loses their shot at a championship they may have another 55 chances at it while you are around, on average. Even though I took losses hard at 18 there was a resilience and a youthful naïveté – we’ll just get them next year. When you are 55 that’s down to just 18 chances to get them next year. And each year that goes by without is an increasing percentage of what’s left. This year it’s 5.5% of the remaining seasons (again, just working of average mortality statistics…xD?). But next year it’s 5.9%. And if this goes on another few years we are talking about the 8% and greater range. It’s going to get dicey for the head if one keeps staring at the numbers.
And then there’s this Arsenal team and the sheer pleasure they bring, and what that’s meant to me. Last season and this season have diverted me away from this maudlin math. The beauty of this team, the joy of watching this Arsenal squad play, has corrected a fair bit of that desperate outlook (not all of it: I still want us to win everything!). The knowledge that despite sports’ binary nature (win/lose, all or nothing), much of the reward of sports comes from moments (and from sharing those moments with other like-minded obsessives), that not winning it all doesn’t mean not winning anything at all. Saliba’s curling goal against Bournemouth last year. Reiss. Rice and United. Rice and Luton. The final glorious penalty against Porto. All these moments are mine/ours, whether Sunday happens or not. I now enjoy these moments differently. I don’t have to sweat that chase for immortality the same way.
I don’t have to do the math.