On Thursday, November 3rd, 2016, the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908. One hundred and eight years. A fanbase that has long suffered for over a CENTURY has finally achieved sports glory. During their reign of mediocrity, the Cubs gained the title of the “lovable losers”–their inability to win became a sort of charming stain on the city. They have suffered many a heartbreaking loss, from Bartman (look it up) to the 84’ NLCS–where the Cubbies lead the San Diego Padres 3-0–before collapsing in the 7th and 8th innings and losing a chance at their first World Series appearance in 39 years.

No discussion of sports city misery is complete without mentioning the most cursed of them all: here’s looking at you, Cleveland. The Cavaliers championship this past season has redeemed the city slightly, but its unfortunate history has left many a head in hands, and many a remote through a television set.

I speak of such horrors as The Drive, The Fumble, and The Shot. Oh, and who could forget The Decision? This is how laughably unlucky Cleveland is: their major sports catastrophes have all been given a title with “The” in the front, along with ominous italics. These names sound mundane and less than creative to the outside observer, but ask any sports junkie about The Shot or any of the other events listed above and you’ll receive two of the following reactions: either A) a piteous laugh or B) a solemn shiver of acknowledgement, and a promptly erected middle finger intended for the god of their choice.

Cleveland’s misfortune continued in usual fashion on late Wednesday night: after being up 3-1 in the World Series, the Cleveland Indians lost the remaining 3 games, and lost the series to, interestingly enough, the Chicago Cubs! Now one curse has been lifted, and one still can’t seem to be escaped.

But why does this all matter? Why do we enjoy sports so much? And most importantly, why do fans of Cleveland and other cities subject themselves to the torture of season upon laborious season of tragedy and disaster? It’s the definition of insanity, is it not? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

To the non-sports fan, these are understandable inquiries. I was once asked, upon watching my beloved San Antonio Spurs be picked apart and eliminated by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA Playoffs, why it mattered so much to me; why I allowed myself to be so devastated by something that may not matter in the end. At the time, I couldn’t muster a response, but after letting my feelings fester for about six months, I think I have an answer.

We watch for the pure, unabashed beauty that comes from the strength of community.

Ultimately, that’s what sports are about, and why teams are separated into their region or city. Humans are social creatures, and we take pride in where we come from, and the bonds we have formed and relationships we have cultivated, there and throughout our lives.

Throughout my 19 years on this earth, this has become increasingly more apparent through a litany of stories from friends, and my own experiences. One of my earliest comes from the summer of 2008. I was staying in a hotel in upstate New York. The place was rather upscale and gave a stern wag of the finger to any guest who attempted to watch television during the day. An exception was made one night, during the men’s gold medal final in swimming. Michael Phelps had just finished his part of the race, and the final member of his team, Jason Lezak, took off for the final leg, the freestyle. As the french swimmer ahead of Lezak surged forward, we all feared for the worst, not realizing that Lezak (a distant relative of Mermaid Man) was catching up to the Frenchman! As Lezak beat the Frenchman by inches to win the gold, I felt my vision blur over (an interesting phenomenon that my buddy Jonathan and I both experience in these kinds of moments) and the whole room exploded with joy. I jumped around like a maniac, my goofy smile quickly accompanied by tears of unfathomable glee as I hugged and high-fived people I had never seen in my life. My fellow guests bellowed chants of, “U.S.A., U.S.A.” throughout the hotel–no doubt offending all senior citizens and francophiles present.

There are many moments like these in sports. Moments that you will always cherish and remember, even years after the confetti stops falling and your heroes retire. It’s a last second buzzer beater, a walk-off home run. It’s your high school basketball team balling out for a whole season, uniting an entire school district (I see you, BBP). It’s the Cavaliers finally winning the NBA championship, sending the population of Cleveland dancing into the streets when they haven’t for over 50 years. It’s the gut-wrenching agony of a Ray Allen three-point shot, followed the next year by the unbridled ecstasy of redemption.

It may seem foolish to the uninitiated, but for me, I’ll take the bumps and bruises of fandom along the way: the unimaginable highs, and the hellish lows. I’ll take it all, for the love of the game.

I’d like to end this piece with a quote from Roger Angell, a writer for the New Yorker. This was written in 1975, after Carlton Fisk's famous home run in the 1975 World Series. He sums up what it means to be a fan beautifully:

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look–I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring–caring deeply and passionately, really caring–which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete–the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball–seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”