The Packers played dreadfully in their biggest game of the year and were knocked out of the playoffs by the Giants tonight. A 15-1 team had never lost its first playoff game before. It was a terrible ending to an amazing season. Had this same game taken place last year I would have been unreasonably upset for multiple days and sulked out of spite for quite a while. I would have been generally difficult to be around and very easy to annoy. For my wife and co-workers, it would not have been a fun stretch.
While I certainly still care... and was definitely hurting after the loss... times have changed. The shifting of priorities has begun. Having fatherhood on the horizon is the ultimate trump card. Sports losses don't sting quite as much when the thought of holding your baby in your arms is swirling through your mind every day. I don't see how it can. The older I get, the easier it is to seperate a game from life. Granted it takes a little longer after particularly big games like tonight. But the awareness happens a little more each year. Fatherhood is about to throw its elbow into that even more.
Not that I'm going to be some schmuck who loses all his passions and interests once I become a father. It's just that there was a time when these games, my teams, were a big chunk of what I had to live for. Following them took up a good percentage of my time, thinking about games took up a good percentage of my thoughts. That's the main difference. There's less space for it now. I still bled after the game tonight. I just didn't need a band-aid for very long.
The one exception to all of this is of course the Cubs. If they, when they, as soon as they finally find a way to win the World Series, it will be like I'm 8, 12, 18 and 25 again all at once. I'll weep like a baby and yell like a teenager. And my child(ren) will wonder when exactly it was that their dad went off the deep end...
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