Crushing losses part of being a sports fan
Buzzer-beating threes, inexcusable losses, predictably terrible Mountain West officiating and even an off-the-backboard alley-oop dunk.
Halfway through conference play, Utah State basketball has managed to both exceed expectations and leave faithful Aggie fans wishing for do-overs in each of USU’s five conference losses.
Most recently, the Aggies lost their first-ever game to Boise State in the Spectrum, a streak USU could have extended with one more rebound or a better final shot. It’s been a theme this season. We led UNLV by six with a minute left, led New Mexico by two until David Collette fouled out and matched the Broncos stride-for-stride until Derrick Marks knocked down a 3-pointer with his heels on the USU logo to put Tuesday’s game just out of reach.
Losing sucks.
It’s also part of what makes a sports fan, a sports fan.
As an eight-year-old Portland Trail Blazer fan, I watched what (up until Sunday’s Super Bowl) was the single most scarring sports-related experience of my life. A young Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’neal erased a 16-point fourth-quarter deficit against Portland to win the Western Conference and ultimately the 2000 NBA championship, sending the Blazers into a decade-long spiral of bad teams and injuries that only just ended with the emergence of Damian Lillard.
As good as the ’90s must have been for fans who can remember those Blazer teams, the 2000s were conversely terrible.
That’s what forges your identity as sports fan. Suffering through teams that break your heart year in and year out along with your fellow fans, sometimes forgetting why you put yourself through such anguish over an industry that claims to exist for entertainment, because you know it’s more than that.
For the Aggies, the highs and lows have been all over the map this year. Aggie football lost its best players to injury two games into the season, beat the Cougars in their own house, got trampled by Boise State’s Jay Ajayi in what was essentially the Mountain West title game, and then won a bowl game with a fourth-string quarterback.
That’s a roller coaster of a season.
Basketball seems to be following in suit. The new-look Aggies have won four games when trailing at halftime, lost double-digit leads in a matter of minutes and beaten MW contender BSU on the road with a Collette 3-pointer that had no business going in.
The team picked to finish 10th in the conference is currently placed sixth — and fans get the feeling that even sixth isn’t good enough for how winnable each loss has been this season.
Being a sports fan is a great and terrible thing. You make an agreement when you invest in something so oddly powerful as a sports team. You commit to enduring the hard losses, like Seattle fans who watched a miracle Super Bowl win come crashing down in the blink of an eye. In exchange, you get to refer to you and your team as a “we,” proudly cheering for them rain or shine with an eye towards future seasons.
Then, when the magical season arrives when your team is the top of the food chain, you experience what can only be described as pure joy.
Hope is the sports fan’s most valuable quality. I thought our women’s basketball team was going to win the Mountain West tournament last year. I thought volleyball was going to beat the unbeatable Colorado State Rams. I thought we had a chance against Boise State’s football team, and even now sitting at a 5-5 conference record I think Aggie basketball is ready to turn some heads in Vegas this March.
Because even if that doesn’t happen, it’s what makes me a sports fan.
—Logan Jones is a junior majoring in journalism. He is also a Blazer fan and therefore part of one of the five most-tortured fan bases in all of sports. Contact him at logantjones@aggiemail.usu.edu or on Twitter @logantj.