“Elation” is a word often used surrounding championships.
The “elation a team feels.” “The elation a championship brings to the town of the team.”
Thesaurus.com gives four words as antonyms for elation: depression, sadness, sorrow, unhappiness.
The image of Wisconsin fans on State street Monday night following the Badgers’ 68-63 defeat at the hands of Duke in the final of the 2015 NCAA men’s basketball tournament showed these.
The Badgers doled out those same feelings the previous Saturday, April 4, handing Kentucky their first, and fatal, loss of the season in the final four.
40-0, a perfect season, what seemed to be an unattainable dream, right at their fingertips, crushed by a band of sharpshooters, who had their own championship aspirations put to rest not three days later by Mike Krzyzewski, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time.
Following losses like these, fans get emotional, sometimes downright irrational, and things can get out of hand.
Riots break out, people are injured, couches, especially those that sit in Lexington, are set ablaze as some sort of furniture sacrifice to the basketball gods who have wronged the Wildcat faithful in hopes of more merciful blessings the following year.
Sports fans are one of, if not the, most delusional groups on Earth.
I — and I assure you that nobody who is familiar with me would argue with this — am in upper echelon of the delusional.
I invested in sports far too early. School was certainly not my forte, so around the time algebra and chemistry books made their way into my backpack, I set them aside to watch the same SportsCenter four times in a row.
On Monday, April 7, another major championship came and went. Coach Krzyzewski and Duke walked away victorious, while Wisconsin, who days before avenged a terribly painful loss after waiting an entire year, trudged off the court with the same amount of championships they left last year’s tournament with.
I know the feeling.
Granted, I’m not a division-one athlete who’s just lost a championship, but here’s who I can relate to; the people on State street.
The couch burners in Lexington, and the “Run the ball,” Seahawks tangent.
Here’s my message to those groups: It doesn’t get better.
Auburn vs. Florida State in the BCS national championship.
We all know how it went.
Walking back to the car, parked about a half mile from the stadium on a golf course, I encountered no less than 100 Florida State fans, popping champagne, dancing, hugging each other. As if the game weren’t enough.
That night, I lay awake on a UCLA couch, watching Kelvin Benjamin catch that game-winning touchdown over and over again. I must have watched it 100 times that night.
I haven’t the slightest idea why I inflicted such torture on myself. I haven’t watched it, or any other second of that game, since.
Go back 14 years.
Super Bowl XXXIV. Titans vs. Rams.
Just weeks before in the Wild Card game, the Titans pulled off arguably the greatest play in the history of sports that would come to be known as the Music City Miracle. (I said arguably; I haven’t forgotten the Kick Six.)
At that point in my young life, Steve McNair was the closest thing I’d ever seen to a real-life super hero. He, along with Eddie George, Jevon Kearse and the rest of the Titans, were underdogs to the 13-3 Rams, but the game was a nail biter, all the way down to the last drive — and the last yard.
Down 23-16, McNair and the offense took over, and put together a drive that was nothing short of amazing, including McNair pulling off one of the greatest sack escapes of all time.
With six seconds to go, McNair had the Titans at the 10-yard line.
Tight end Frank Wycheck took a free release route, attempting to lure linebacker Mike Jones away from Kevin Dyson’s slant route.
At the goal line, at the last millisecond possible, Jones turned his head and noticed Kevin Dyson with the ball about two yards out from the end zone.
Jones wrapped his arms around Dyson’s legs and took him to the ground, while Dyson tried with all his might to extend the ball over the plane.
The ball was spotted at the half-yard line as time ran out.
The Titans came half a yard short from a Lombardi Trophy.
After all those losses, people around me, mostly my mother, tried to convince me that I would forget about it eventually, and I did.
But with each passing championship, I remember how it feels to be a fan of a team that comes up short of a championship.
It’s not life or death, and it in no way compares to the pain I assume the actual players feel, but it hurts nonetheless.
Some people say, “it’s just sports.” But when you’ve been invested as long as I have, I assure you, it’s much, much more than that.
David McKinney is the assistant sports editor for The Plainsman. He can be contacted at sports@ThePlainsman.
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