It starts with glory. Basking in the bright sunshine, that golden euphoria, ignorant of the utter transience of the moment. Your favorite team—whether it be baseball, football or even cricket—just summited the highest peak of the sports world, and the photo of your favorite player, ski goggles donned and hoisting a trophy high, is already framed on your wall. The city streets are an immaculate mess of beer cans, confetti and millions of fans rejoicing in a celebration years in the making. This is the start of a dynasty—nobody can stop you.  

The leaves change, and after a long wait the new season is upon you, but your team doesn’t exactly look the same. Perhaps it’s a veteran, long beloved by the fanbase, deciding to hang it up after a lengthy career, or maybe your budding star took a pay raise in a new city. But that nucleus you love, for the most part, is still intact, and you expect the same magic of the past. The pieces are still there, and you’re still top dog. It only makes sense, right? What you don’t realize, not yet, is that the entropy of the sports world inevitably tends toward disaster.  

Your team plays well, but something nags at you: a sixth sense, as if a silent predator were lurking just behind you. There’s just something…off. The team is still winning, but the games are closer; those teams you put away early last year are hanging around a bit longer; things aren’t as smooth, and that explosiveness just isn’t as potent. So what, it may not be a championship year, but how often do teams really go back to back? “We’ll be better again next year,” you say. You don’t say anything, however, about the creeping doubts quietly nesting in the back of your mind. People will think you’re not supporting the team, so it stays within. You secretly wonder whether you’re the only one thinking about it—you’re not.  

Over the next couple years, those flickers of trouble slowly grow, and what once were worrying moments are now full-blown problems. Players aren’t producing like they did, mistakes pile up, and the great equalizer—the wins column—suddenly doesn’t look so hot. Playoffs are less certain. It becomes a roller coaster ride of emotions as your team now only shows flashes of its former brilliance amid a swath of mediocrity. Then begin the rumblings; the commentators and analysts are always the first to stoke controversy, but from there the fire only grows. You learn very quickly that fanbases are exponentially easier to outrage than to please.  

Then come the dreaded middling years, undoubtedly the toughest period of a sports fan’s existence. What once was a steady relationship with winning has become a no more than a distant flirt across the train tracks. By this point, everyone on the outside can tell that the spark is gone, but you, naïve as ever, still hold onto the dwindling hope that your team can still pull it together and regain that magic. “If our guys can just play like their normal selves again, we’ll be a contender for sure,” you say after they drop another game to the league laughingstock. It takes a long time for those sparkling memories of the past to fade. It takes even longer to realize that your heroes, those unstoppable titans, exist only in those memories; the present makes cruel mockery of them. The product on the field doesn’t lie—your team is washed.

Finally, you face an ultimatum: You can shrink back into those memories and become the voice in the barbershop, cursed to repeat the same story until the end times. Or you can bear cruel reality and wade through the uncertain waters ahead, banner flying high. It will not be easy to say goodbye to the fading stars you love, to find new ones, to return to glory, but you cannot find peace by avoiding life. You’re a sports fan—there’s no cure for that. If you truly love your team, now is the chance to prove it.