I've posted enough pictures recently, so now we're back to words. I've always been competitive by nature (or is it nurture?), so if I get involved in something competitive it seriously affects my thoughts and emotions. The place where competition is most obvious is sports.
When I played high school basketball, I would sit on the bench (yes, I did a lot of that) and consciously try to make myself not care as much as I did, so that the sting of losing would not be so strong. Of course, we won far more games than we lost, so that was not much of a problem. As my esteemed teammate Courtney Hindman said once: "Winning is fun. Losing is not." At the time I thought that statement was a bit shallow, but now, looking back on my athletic career, I realize that winning was much more fun than losing. While our few losses often taught us important lessons (and engendered shouting lectures from our senior year coach), our wins were more fun. Simple as that.
Winning is fun when you're on a team, but I was never on a sports team in high school that actually won the whole shebang, and by that I mean the state championship. In middle school our eighth grade basketball team went undefeated and won the championship, which was sweet, albeit on a much smaller scale.
The only team for which I ever cheered that actually won state was the girls cross country team my senior year. I had quit my sophomore year but my sisters were on the team. I joined the tennis team, which also won state, but that was neither here nor there for me since I did not qualify for the state team. All this to say, the only meaningful "whole shebang" championship that I ever was a part of as a fan was that cross country team. But while cross country is a great sport and can be exciting, it still doesn't involve quick reactions in high-pressure situations that can make other sports very exciting (e.g. basketball, baseball, football).
As for college or professional sports, I have always been an Iowa football and basketball fan (college) and a St. Louis Cardinals fan (professional). Other than that, I haven't really connected myself to any team long-term (I went for the Utah Jazz back when they were playoff contenders, but that was just a brief stint, and they always lost to the Bulls). No Iowa teams have won any championship in my lifetime, and the last time the Cardinals won the World Series was in 1982, when I was eight months old. So when it comes to exciting "whole shebang" wins, I've never experienced any...until now.
