Spring training starts this Friday, and I could not be happier. It may not actually be spring yet, but the start of baseball's annual preseason ritual puts everyone in a good mood. Hope springs eternal, whether your team is the Kansas City Royals or the Pittsburgh Pirates, the New York Yankees or the St. Louis Cardinals.
Every new season marks the beginning of new opportunities. Very rarely are these opportunities met or our greatest desires realized, but yet every year they come around just the same. No one expects failure, and the goal is always success. The standard may change, but hope still remains.
Since I have been at Dartmouth, there have been many moments filled with the triumph of victory and the agony of defeat. Teams have qualified for national tournaments, made runs searching for NCAA titles, oftentimes close, but never reaching the ultimate goal. Failure is not something Dartmouth students or athletes deal with very well, nor should one expect them to. But the elusive goal always remains, and when it is finally accomplished, it will have been worth the wait.
As hope is an essential part of sports, the realization of those hopes is the ultimate dream. Sports fans are viewers of a never-ending play, a series of improvisational moments strung together into plots and subplots. In an era of 24-hour news cycles, virtually everything becomes news, and the type of celebrity gossip that many people trash becomes acceptable. It has often been said that sports are the male version of a soap opera, but I think that argument misses the broader appeal. Sports transcend race, sex and class, bringing together people whose sole connection to each other is an interest in the results on the field, court or arena.
Through sport, we watch others accomplish the dreams we never could, in part living vicariously through them, in part attaching ourselves to something larger. Some find it trivial, but those people are not reading this column.
Fandom is often a lonely road, especially if the team that one roots for is constantly inept, or worse, tragically unlucky. My father waited the first 54 years of his life to see his Red Sox win a World Series, and every year new fans see their dreams fulfilled (this year it was Colts fans, Cardinals fans under 24, and the five real fans of the Miami Heat). The players come and go, the fans continue to wait, and the longer the wait, the greater the feeling when success is realized. Whether at the local level or the professional, one is always surprised. My freshman year of high school, my school's football team won two games, and we were lucky just to win that many. This year, we won a state championship, storming past virtually every team we faced. A small, 900-person high school, not filled with exceptional athletes, but with dogged determination and a coach devoted to both his team and his town. Sports are a series of connections, whether at the local level, the collegiate level, or the professional.
I could talk about sports at endless length, but they only grant me so much space for this column. So I must return to my original point: Spring training begins this week. Soon the fields of Florida and Arizona will be filled with flying baseballs, the sound of wood against leather, stories of 22-year-old kids trying to realize their dream. Unlike most people, their dreams are remarkably public, as are their failures. Through professional athletes, we see ourselves, our dreams forgotten due to either lack of skill, desire or even chance. (I must unfortunately place myself squarely in the first category.)
Experts prognosticate, fans banter, most of whom are certain in the belief that this is their year, but ultimately the course is set by the nine men who set foot on the field each day in pursuit of victory. Over the next eight months, we will watch them eagerly, frustrated when they fail, joyous when they succeed, each night one scene in a larger play. It will disappoint and frustrate us, get us through long days and tough nights, but we will always be captivated by the magic of sweeping curveballs, shoestring catches, 500-foot moonshots where white spheres disappear into the summer sky. For when it comes to baseball, hope springs eternal.
