Better to have played and lost

Thankful Friday
So this past weekend was Eli’s first baseball tournament of the summer, and after a heartbreaking loss in the semi-finals all I could imagine writing about was the agony of defeat. How real it is, and how visceral. How evident it is on the face of a 10-year-old boy.

And also how curious it is that I personally – a grown woman and merely a spectator – can feel like I’m in mourning for days about an 8-7 loss in a 10U Little League game.

Not that I’m alone in caring about such things. Shoot! The entire pre-2004 Red Sox nation was prostrate with despair every September for nearly a century. Tue, the Sox weren’t 10-year-old kids, but they weren’t the fans’ own flesh and blood, either.

Anyway, back to the only thing I could imagine writing about being the agony of defeat. Well, since I started thinking about this post, a few things happened:

1. We took Boo to the pet ER because she could barely breath. The vet told us she has heart failure and drained over 100 cubic centimeters of fluid from around her organs. We put the $300+ charge on a credit card and took her home to see how long we can keep her purring comfortably.
2. The week was over in a flash, and suddenly it was Thursday night, and time to stop whining and concentrate on Thankful Friday.

So instead of focusing on the agony of defeat, I thought I’d say a few words (a very few, because this week has wiped me out and I'm exhausted!) about the thrill of victory. And the thrill of almost victory. The thrill of playing your heart out with teammates. The thrill of fielding a ground ball cleanly or sliding into third base.

And what in the world the thrill of playing team sports has to do with our cat.

Why We Compete
I'm sure I've recommended this Washington Post series called "Why We Compete" a dozen times already, but here it is again. There are eight stories in the series; each explores a reason that humans compete: money, ego, opportunity, curiosity, tradition, community, identity and andrenalin. It's the last four that really interest me, particularly as they pertain to team sports. Those are the things I love about playing soccer and softball; they're what I love about being a Giants fan or watching my kids' teams.

And while I could go on and on about tradition, community and identity in team sports, adrenalin is the word of the day. It's what I'm thankful for today: the thrill of winning, striving, making the play; the rush of rounding third and going for home when the throw is on the way.

I'm grateful for clutch plays where your team is depending on you, and for the sweet cameraderie of being picked up by your teammates when you falter. For the rush of competition tempered by the solid, grounding goodness of knowing the game and feeling your body play the ball just right.

I'm grateful for that top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling of pure, heady anticipation when your kid's at bat with everything on the line or pitching, for god's sake, in the bottom of the sixth, even though it means your heart is pounding right out of your chest.

As Dale wrote to me today, "I like the raw emotional feel to it all... " And maybe I'm projecting but I felt like there was a whole lot of something in that ellipses.

Better to Have Played and Lost
Back when I was planning to simply write about the agony, I was wondering how to explain why I allow myself to get so emotionally caught up in this stuff when it feels so BAD after a tough loss. I didn't high hopes about explaining it well, and was reminded of the conversation I had the other day with a friend who doesn't have kids and doesn't want any. I was trying to explain to him that being a mom is the most profoundly wonderful thing about my life despite, for starters, diapers, tantrums, frequent heartache, crushing accountability and near-complete loss of self.

But just today (here comes my second unauthorized quote of this post), my sister Maurie responded to my post about Boodles by saying, "Everyone should have the chance to love an animal so much that it hurts."

So simple, Maur, and so true. And so it goes with baseball.

We'll be back.