2015
"Meaningful games," we said a lifetime ago -- "we just want games to mean something. We just want them to matter." --- I have been tired virtually every day since the August long weekend, which in a sort of cruel coincidence was the last time the Blue Jays played the Royals before this one. I have no idea what is going on in the world outside of the Canadian election, the results of which I was refreshing while in attendance at Game 3 of the ALCS. I have barely eaten any vegetables for months. I am exhausted. Nobody warns you about the superhuman endurance that contention will require of you, and we were not prepared. It starts long before the playoffs do - when you don't wake up to the frantic texts about acquiring Troy Tulowitzki and you see it the next morning and yell loud enough that you have to apologize to your roommate later. It starts at the wild, unfathomable trade deadline when one of the best pitchers in baseball changes uniforms and for the first time you are neither devastated nor indifferent. It keeps going when you cancel plans week by week to watch the games, and you tell people who want to hang out with you that you are free on a random Thursday three weeks from now because that is the only off day left. It goes on for what seems like forever. But it is not, of course, forever. --- In the dying days of the 2014 season, as the Blue Jays' grip on the wild card slipped away for good, I allowed myself to imagine what that game might have been like. I was grateful in a weird way for missing out on it, because perhaps the way to end a 21-year drought was not a do-or-die game where you could lose and be done before you knew what was happening. The Kansas City Royals, the other blue-and-white drought-ridden underdog, did not miss out on it. And they did not, despite Oakland's best efforts, lose. I hated them then and I hate them more now. Sports are spiteful and so am I. --- There is one sound in my mind that I will remember for the rest of my life--the sound of a collective 49,000 people screaming with all the feeling in their souls as Jose Bautista liquefied a baseball. There is no replacement for that. I believe that if I am in attendance to watch Jose Bautista hit a walkoff home run in the World Series, it will sit adjacent to this memory, not above. --- I do not have an overarching theme to this, and I do not have the ability to tie in all of my life experiences with what happened this season. In previous years it was easy. Losing is tidy and neat; you play the same number of games per year, and no matter how any of them feel, you are done on the day you expect to be done. The postseason does not concern itself with you. Perhaps that's the point here: Winning is sometimes so much harder than losing. For all teams but one, winning will eventually turn into loss, but you don't get the quiet comfort of knowing when; you sit there and wait, and watch, and feel every nanosecond slip by, and hope that you have more time. This year there was so much more time. It was delicious, exhilarating, excruciating. It mattered. And it was never, ever enough.
