Where Does the Love Go? It Doesn't.

Tonight, for about two hours, I sat and watched a basketball game, a Celtics game, on TV. It was a great two hours. Watching the Celtics play basketball made me feel like a visitor to my former life, although I certainly wasn't thinking that while I was watching; I was just watching. And talking back to the TV, and calling my dad and sister who were at the stadium during time-outs, and wondering for the thousandth time why professionals would think throwing up three-pointers was a better way to victory than just running the plays.

This is the point, though, that it is very difficult, these days, even when I am alone or doing something I love, to get away, out of my head, for any reasonable amount of time. Two hours felt reasonable; I'll take it any way I can get it. But besides serving as a much needed outlet, conduit out--for a moment in time, anyway--watching the game made me remember how much I love watching basketball, love this team.

It's a very funny thing, to love a team. For of course the team I watched tonight, KG, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, is not the team I watched and loved five, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and those teams were not the same as each other. The players shift like detritus on the beach as the waves crash and retreat: a few new shells or strands of seaweed wash up, and a piece of driftwood washes back to the sea. A few players remain; the rest go, and then the old ones go too. The ocean changes, roughened by a storm, calmed by a period of mild weather, guided by the tides, but existing all the same; its existence is a constant, so is The Team.

So loving a team is loving an idea, a symbol, continuity of something larger than the sum of its parts, its parts at all. And for me, as I suspect is true for many other fans of basketball and other sports, it is being a part of something myself, of believing in and investing in something with other people, focusing hope on a single target as as an amorphous yet connected group. This is a weird concept, this "being a fan." I have tried to write about it before and have never quite succeeded. It defies logic, really, seems linked to some of the bad ways groups organize around a common theme. But yet it is good, and it is powerful, too--this unspoken connection to an enormous wave of emotion centering on a group of men in shorts, a leather ball, a wooden floor, a game.

Being a fan is like being in a family, the biggest family in the world. You don't have to agree on religion or politics, and you don't have to be nice to each other at holidays. Becoming a fan is more mysterious, a subject for another day. But being one is easy. You just have to want the same thing as your team's other fans, sit tight when you don't get it, ride the shifting tides of fate over time, and love: actively or passively depending on your circumstances. But actively is better.

This seems like a trifle, a cream puff, and maybe it is. I'm skirting around, haven't brought the nail-biting, hands to the head in dismay, actual fist pumping engagement of fandom to life. But my thesis is sound. Being a fan is a very real way to engage with the world, and engaging with the world, as much as you can, loving something in a way that transcends the thing itself, is important. It feels great. I needed a reminder. I wanted a victory, and sweetly, I got that too.