This weekend, I experienced a humiliating event.
After trekking six hours to my beloved Penn State University, my alma mater, for one of the biggest games of the year, after the painful process of obtaining tickets, hotel room, and gathering the troops to make the trip happen: our team forgot to show up.
No, seriously. We scored in the first quarter and it were never heard from again. As we sat close together with 110,000 of our closest friends in the statuesque Beaver Stadium our mouths gaped open in disbelief as we watched our previously-strong team fall to pieces at the hands of the evil Ohio Buckeyes.
After a sad, sad 24-7 blowout in which the Buckeyes cleaned our clock in our own stadium, the crowd grew silent as we shuffled out of the stadium, tired from the energy and subsequent draining loss of the day. We had a lone Buckeye in our group. He didn’t gloat–I have to hand it to him. In fact, he was very gracious as this was his first trip to the mecca called Happy Valley and the fact that his favorite team had eaten the Lions’ lunch in their own stadium had to be smug satisfaction enough. We didn’t talk much on the long walk back to the car after the game.
When we loaded up and sat in unmoving traffic on the way out of State College towards our hotel, we started recounting the day: the boisterous tailgate with the most massive cookout ever, the gorgeous sunshine that is rare in the Pennsylvania mountains in November, the laughter than ensued recounting old college-day stories. We kept rolling into the next two hours as the traffic droned on and our bones warmed from the chill of the stadium, and the sadness of the loss started to drip away.
It was then that, even though saddened that my team wasn’t victorious, I realized how important it is to lose sometimes. As a competitive individual with a penchant for setting (often ridiculous) goals I’ll admit that I don’t like to lose. And, being a tried-and-true Penn Stater who returns every year to experience the magic that is Penn State Football, I surely don’t like my Nittany Lions experiencing any kind of loss, particularly on my watch.
Yet, losing humbles us, reminds us of the challenge of the sport, and that, at the end of the day: every one cannot be a winner. Although it can knock the wind out of our sails, a loss can bring us down to our senses and help us to realize that without an occasional loss, we’d never experience the thrill of victory, the roar of the crowd, the waving of the home-team flag.
In the course of fourteen hours, we’d reconnected with old friends, breathed in fresh mountain air, cheered with an unprecendented crowd, and laughed until our cheeks hurt. It was then that it hit me that it really doesn’t matter who wins the game; all that matters is that you show up.
Comment on this post