Life Is Pain
Somebody teach me how to stop. I can't go on like this.
I've seen it all. A 25-point blown lead in the second half of the Super Bowl. A 17-0 blown lead in another NFC Championship Game. Tennessee crumbling into the preeminent has-been football program in the country. Giving up 10 runs in the first inning of a winner-take-all game in the NLDS. And then to cap it all off, a blown 3-1 lead with a trip to the World Series on the line.
The way I have felt for the past 12 hours has made me realize that the Braves are the only team I really, truly care about. Tennessee losing to Kentucky in Knoxville for the first time since 1984 may have been the final straw I needed to really allow myself to check out, but even then, I don't think the Vols have ever made me feel the way I do right now — other than the Sweet Sixteen loss to Purdue, but the basketball program is actually worth a damn.
I think it's a cultural thing in the South because the Braves are the one team that everybody you know cares about. Regardless of what college you went to or whatever else, everybody is invested in Braves baseball. And until this year, every single NLDS that I can recall ended in a loss. Some of them worse than others, but the result was the same every time.
And then we finally made it within a game of the World Series — with three chances to pick up that final elusive win. And it ends in a fashion so predictable that only the most gluttonous for punishment and truly ignorant of all history could fall for it. And yet, there I was.
That Cody Bellinger home run has happened so many times in different forms over the years that a reaction like that from an Atlanta sports fan should honestly have to be rehearsed. Nobody who has seen the things I have seen should have thought anything else was going to happen. Yet still, I slumped into that couch like it was my first time.
I don't even know what to do. The darkness engulfs my soul like a tidal wave rushing over the shore. I am consumed by pain.
Somebody please make it stop.