Don't call it a guest post: Selection Sunday

Ed. note: In honor of Selection Sunday, I’m handing the reins over to a dear friend of We Have Hair, for what is hopefully the first of many contributions to this site. Not only is she one of the smarter people I know, but she also knows a whole lot more than I do about college sports. Take it away, Firefly:

I recently read Mystic River (I know, I know, an Oscar-winning motion picture from years ago—I'm behind the times). While the book itself was stunning in many ways, there was one specific passage that stuck with me. At the start of chapter four, Lehane uses a baseball game to bring us into the mind of one of his main characters:

"Dave found himself paying more attention to the lights and the fans an Anaheim Stadium itself than to the actual game.

He watched the faces in the bleachers most-the disgust and defeated fatigue, the fans looking like they were taking the loss more personally than the guys in the dugout. And maybe they were. For some of them, Dave figured, this was the only game they'd attend this year. They'd brought the kids, the wife, walked out of their homes into the early California evening with coolers for the tailgate party and five thirty dollar tickets so they could sit in the cheap seats and put twenty-five dollar caps on their kids heads, eat six-dollar rat burgers and $4.50 hot dogs and watered-down Pepsi and sticky ice cream bars that melted into the hair of their wrists. They came to be elated and uplifted, Dave knew, raised up out of their lives by the rare spectacle of victory. That's why arenas and ballparks felt like cathedrals--buzzing with light and murmured prayers and forty thousand hearts all beating the drum of the same collective hope.

Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back to out otherwise winless lives.

Win for me. Win. Win. Win.

But when your team lost, that collective hope crumbled into shards and any illusion of unity you'd felt with your fellow parishioners went with it. Your team had failed you and only served to remind you that usually when you tried, you lost. When you hoped, hope died. And you sat there in the debris of the cellophane wrappers and popcorn and soft, soggy drink cups dumped back into the numb wreckage of your life, facing a long dark walk back through a long dark parking lot with hordes of drunk, angry strangers, a silent wife tallying up your latest failure, and three cranky kids. All so you could get into your car and drive back to your home, the very place from which this cathedral had promised to transport you."

I have seen many debates on what it means to be a sports "fan" these days, and they all make me feel guilty for not having a "team" and a closet full of jerseys. As if I'm somehow less of fan because I love sports for the game itself rather than who’s playing in it. I'm just as excited to watch Amherst play Williams as I am to watch Michigan State take on Michigan. (During the fall I've been known to watch nothing but college football from Thursday night until the wee hours of Sunday morning.) When I tell people I don’t have an allegiance to any one team, they always seem surprised. They’ll ask where I grew up (Chicago, and I can remember the 1985 Super Bowl-shuffling Bears, and Michael Jordan’s Bulls teams of the 1990s) or went to school—as if an allegiance should have arisen somewhere in there if I was truly a sports fan.

For me, my passion for sports comes from a deep-seated love of the process of the games. The hope of winning for any given team on any given day, rather than who in particular is playing, is what makes sports so compelling. If there is a chance for a surprising team to pull out a win, I'm all eyes and ears, even if it’s in a sport I don’t normally follow like NASCAR, lacrosse, or curling. And that is what Lehane nailed about sports that makes me a fan: it’s the immeasurable hope found in the playing of the game.

There is no better example of how this hope fills my soul and makes my life more bearable than the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It arrives just as spring is trying with all its might to break through the clouds, rain, and lashing winds. It arrives when teasing, 50-degree afternoons are weighted down by the last dregs of winter, and there isn't a three-day weekend in sight until Memorial Day. March is the long, fallow patch when I struggle hard, treading water corporate office-style, to keep my head above ground while waiting for the sun to stay out past 7pm.

And in these final spasms of chilliness, a field of 65 will battle it out, hope versus hope, first-timers and surprise winners against storied programs and national powerhouses. Over 2-hour periods, buzzer-beaters will abound, as will amazing plays by people whose names I'll forget as quickly as I learned them. Their battles on the court provide enough distraction from the mundane tasks of the day-to-day, so that when I look back outside there will be leaves on the trees and a new season will have begun.

So I say welcome to Cal State Fullerton, Cornell and Portland State, go get ‘em to Drake, Butler, and Davidson and hello again to the Longhorns, Bruins and Tar Heels alike. And a special thank you to the Georgia Bulldogs, for bringing their own hopes to this weekend with the moxie they’ve shown making it to the SEC conference championship game. And now, I’ll wait anxiously to see which one of them will don that glass slipper and let my hope spring eternal once again.

Ed.: That's a wrap of the inaugral edition of Don't Call it a Guest Post. For further discussion on the state of fandom, check out Leitch's book or this post by Dan Shanoff.