Twice in my life, I’ve cried during a sporting event.
The first: when The Ohio State University beat Miami in overtime for the first national championship I can remember my favorite team winning. (For some reason this trumped the Reds winning the World Series although seeing Game 1 with my dad was pretty awesome.) It was an emotionally taxing game. Back and forth.
The second: when Landon Donovan streaked the length of the field with four other U.S. players, assaulting the goal as time ran out on their World Cup. They needed a win. They already had one goal taken away earlier in the match by a terrible phantom off-sides call. They had missed two wide open, near empty net goals. It had the air of "one of those days."
And then this:
I sat on my couch this morning, tears streaming uncontrollably from my eyes, my whole body shaking. All I could do was bury my face in my hands.
Why? I guess those reasons are complicated. Like baseball, soccer seems an athletic metaphor for life. This game is as much about the 90-minute journey as it is the wins and losses. It’s brutalizing to watch, humbling to enjoy and emotional at the end.
This team had worked so hard, had done everything the right way and because of two bad calls – 2 whistles – they faced the real possibility of a four-year heartbreak in less than 90 seconds.
Then Donovan Streaked.
He said later at a press conference that this renewed in him the belief that if you do the right things sometimes good wins out. It will sound hokey to some. I’m sure it will be ridiculed in those sly ways people ridicule these things.
But I will ignore them because they have missed the point. They will have missed that the journey was the reward, but in this case – as it is so often not in life – the win was also the reward. And sometimes doing the right things makes good win out.
And I cried.
