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The moments when they finally do it
This isn’t a Rockies post. We’ll just knock that out right away.
Sports fandom is weird. It’s nerdy. It’s boring. It’s ridiculous. You are sacrificing your emotions and (more importantly) your time to something that you have zero impact or control over. No matter how hard you want sports to go your way there is very little chance they ever will.
But sometimes, they do.
In November of 1996, my dad took me to a Nuggets game. I didn’t remember who they played until last night when I looked it up (it was the Clippers, and they lost) but I remember so much about that game because it is, truly, my very first memory of being a sports fan.
At McNichols Arena that night, I remember three things:
1: Bill Clinton was re-elected president. The scoreboard flashed that information and I remember muted claps from the crowd. I honestly don’t know why this is burned into my brain but it is.
2: My dad’s car’s defroster wasn’t working and it was ticking him off. It was a cold November night and we all piled in after the game, causing it to fog up. We had to wait for like 30 minutes for the windows to have visibility again.
3: I was approached by a team employee when I walked in and he told me if I could name 3 Nuggets I would win a Nuggets pin. My dad helped me name two. But I did remember Antonio McDyess on my own. Would be funny to meet 7-year-old me now and explain to him 40% of my brain is dominated by naming random players.
From that moment on, my life has had countless memories tied to sports. I remember watching Ryan Klesko hit a homer while my grandmother shook her head. I remember eating Jell-o football helmets when the Broncos won their second Super Bowl. I remember walking around my neighborhood in 2001 with a fake Stanley Cup made of kitchen bowls and aluminum foil that my neighbors had made. Sports fandom feels very shallow when you consider it. It’s merchandise, television watching, and arguing about people you’ll never meet. But underneath that are memories of driving home with your dad in a car that wasn’t quite working, it’s summer nights raising up kitchen ware as cars pass by.
Sports fandom isn’t about championships, really. Tom Ley mentions that in a piece on Defector today. It would be an awful way to live if the only joy you got out of them were titles. But the Denver Nuggets winning the NBA Championship felt like one of those times where you think “this is why we do this dumb shit.” A culmination of late nights, sullen losses, and hopeful banter. There’s a beauty in those final moments of a championship run. As Kentavious Caldwell-Pope stole a pass off Jimmy Butler I stood in a dark room holding up my arms quietly. My son, a 15-month-old toddler, was fighting sleep in the next room so I couldn’t make more than a little noise. I was quiet and alone in reality, but in a very poetic metaphorical sense, I was obviously not. I was not only with every Nuggets fan in the world cheering for a championship, I wasn’t only with my friends all over the country having the same moment as me, I was with every single memory I’ve ever had of these Denver Nuggets. From November 1996, to May 2003, to now. From Antonio McDyess to Al Harrington to Kenneth Faried to Christian Braun. There is a lifetime lived in sports fandom. It may not be about championships, but in these moments where they finally do it, it brings all these things together. A lifetime of waiting, hoping, losing, and waiting again.
Sports rarely go your way. In your lifetime of watching, your best case scenario is 10 years of watching your team end the season with a win. If there was anything else you did that had the same rate of “success”, you’d never do it. But it’s in these moments, these final seconds where Kyle Lowry clanks a 3 and the confetti starts to fall, that you understand that all those moments were successful. All those times you stayed up late to watch them lose were the same as this. All parts of the same whole.
These feelings and words are probably a cliché by now. They’re certainly a little corny. But maybe we deserve to be a little corny. Sports fandom is really weird, after all. Why not let yourself be a little caught up in it? I do it for the Jell-O football helmets I ate and bar tabs I paid while watching. The moments when they finally do it are special for a reason but all of the moments before that make them that way. Fall into it. If only for a 7-year-old kid with no idea that he was about to make a core memory in a half full McNichols Arena, looking at his dad for help remembering two more Nuggets (LaPhonso and Dale Ellis).