As football fans we've largely resigned the fate of our pleasure to choices, actions, and events that are out of our control. Instead of depending on ourselves for joy and amusement, we've learned to rely on our local football team to supply some of these experiences. When things are going well, this is acceptable. However, when things are not going well, we experience an especially terrible type of stress. We lack control over the outcomes of football games. Stresses from a lack of control are found in psychological studies to be exponentially more harmful than stresses we more voluntarily inflict upon ourselves. Due to this, days like today can seem like a huge problem. They sure as hell feel like a problem. However, this isn't the case.
Instead, days like today are an opportunity. They're an opportunity for sports fans to question aspects of how sports fandom works. We can respond to these questions by pursuing more meaningful pleasures - pleasures that we have some control over. In other words, we can take a day like today and ask ourselves "What does my fandom give me?" and "What does my fandom take away?" More importantly, we might ask "What can I do instead with my time?" Some of us might not be able to look at sports fandom as a mostly negative experience without games like today's going much, much worse than expected. Simply put, it takes a certain degree of insanity to be a sports fan and days like today provided an opportunity to question that insanity. This is the opportunity of unexpected losses.
I enjoy it when we win and when we lose, I enjoy this opportunity those losses provide. When we win, there's the escapist pleasure of basking in the success of others. When we lose, we're being challenged intellectually with evaluating just what it is we're doing with our time as sports fans. Being a fan of people who are regularly winning is clearly fun but it's also a stupid kind of fun. Losing is stressful but it's also the type of stress we can seek to eliminate. From this elimination of uncontrollable stress, we can grow and become better, happier people. Overall, I'm having fun! (And everyone else should too!)
