Hope & Heartbreak — The Omnificent Lifecycle of a Philadelphia Sports Fan

Rinse and repeat until WE die.

Embiid and the Sixers promising season looks sinister. The Waterdogs lost in the championship. Jalen Hurts played like a High School Freshman after a 10-1 start. The Flyers had a top prospect quit on them before playing for them…

But let me take you back.

It’s late Spring, early Summer, the only major team sport on the television is baseball (since we don’t consider soccer, lacrosse, or combat sports major or team oriented yet) and the Phils don’t look so hot. Harper is just getting back. Rhys has been done for the year. Trea Turner is pitiful. JT has been lukewarm all year. It’s a struggle. 

Then… there’s a glimmer of hope.

The Phils start to put it together. From June 3rd to June 18th they go 13-2. Not long after that, Trea Turner receives his infamous standing ovation from the home crowd and he starts to put things together. Now we’re humming, baby. The Phils are a lock for the wild card with little cause for concern. Unlike the previous year.

Red October is back and we’ve got our eyes set on another World Series run.

And so are the defending NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles who start the season off undefeated, as the Phils take care of the Miami Marlins and dismantle the Braves… again.

Despite the Eagles losing to the lowly Jets, Philadelphia is a proud and confident sports town going into the NLCS against the Arizona Diamondbacks. I still can’t name a single player on the team besides Evan Longoria and that’s only because he was the star on the Rays team we beat in ’08. 

And then they shit the bed. Drop a big ole steamy ass dump in the sheets. 

Game 7. At home. They didn’t even show up.

credit: Matt Slocum | AP

So our hope shifts back to the NFC Champion Philadelphia Eagles. 

They’re winning but it’s ugly. Hurts hasn’t outplayed a single QB all year and the defense is shaky. We see the signs of collapse but ignore them and choose to focus on the idea that they’re on the verge of putting it all together. At least some of us do… there’s hope.

The toughest stretch of the year approaches and we sit at 7-1. Rather than falling apart they win three in a row. The team is resilient and they beat three of the best in the Cowboys, Chiefs, and Bills. 

The hope builds.

All the while, a James Harden-less Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers Team is off to a great start. They’re playing good basketball. With Maxey finally owning the number two role in the offense and Embiid playing as the clear MVP favorite, it’s not just hope but it’s excitement. It’s fresh basketball.

And then the Eagles take a fucking nosedive. 

They do so with their noses firmly pressed up inside their own assholes. 

It’s truly a collapse for the history books.

The signs and symptoms were there that they were a plagued football team with gonorrhea, syphilis, and herpes, all at the same time, but rather then switching up their habits, they kept bumping butts, or whatever adults do for fun, with cheap ladies of the night without protection.

Does that analogy work? Not really. Only in the sense that they didn’t make any healthy adjustments, but I’m still angry and it’s one of the more disgusting images that comes to mind.

And that’s what the end of the season was, disgusting.

Even better, the Flyers are relevant again! Pretty cool! Like the Sixers, they’re playing convincingly, with identity and attitude. 

WOOHOO!! YAY!!!

Too good, one might say… and we were right.

EMBIID TEARS HIS MENISCUS.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCKING FUCKER FUCK.

HEARTBREAK.

He’ll come back and we’ll get excited again. I’m excited to get excited about Buddy Hield and convince myself that he’s the solution. Convince ourselves that the Sixers are capable of beating the Bucks, Celtics, Heat. Which I really do believe they can beat any of them. 

But when the Sixers and Flyers both flounder in the playoffs the way they’re both so accustom to, the cycle will commence once again with the Phillies and then the Eagles and so on and so forth until we die.

Miserable underachievers.

Maybe it’s time we change some shit up. We don’t boo the offense in the first half. We don’t boo the Sixers if they have an off game in an 82 game season. We don’t call for firings every single day on the Fanatic and WIP. Maybe the sports coverage slows down a bit. We save the late breaking reports that don’t include anything more than rumors and we stay just a little more positive. Maybe.’