There is nothing more thrilling than a hard-fought victory, nothing sweeter than crossing the finish line of the hardest run of your life, nothing more worth fighting for than your teammates.

And there is nothing more painful than watching it all from the sidelines with an injury.

Most of us are not lucky enough to make it through our athletic careers without some kind of medicinal obstacle. The best we can hope for is a few pulled muscles here and there. But if you are like so many athletes, at some point or another you will face an injury that will steal from you.

It will rob you of your season, keep you out of the championship, take away the record you were on track to breaking, and remove you of your sanity. It will beat you down far past your breaking point and make you question everything. It will create an explosion of frustration in your head and stab a knife in your heart every time game day rolls around and you are still on the bench. You will go to war with yourself over your desire to walk away from it all and the guilt that follows at the thought of abandoning your team. You will feel betrayed as you see yourself replaced on the field and your grief will be immeasurable.

This is what I learned from spending my senior season in college watching from the sidelines with a torn hamstring. The pain and anger that filled my days has also been felt by so many others and any of us could tell you that there is no easy way to cope, no magic words that can take it all away. But in the immortal words of Robert Frost, "the best way out is always through."

The only thing I found made me feel any sort of healing was to confront my despair. When I asked myself why I was so angry, I found that I had based my entire identity on my life as a player. I was so miserable because I felt like I had lost everything that made me who I was. When I realized that there was nothing shameful about defining myself by what else I had to offer, I felt the vice grip on my life start to loosen.

I asked myself why I felt so betrayed and found that I was taking things personally that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the situation. I let go of more resentment and could breathe a little easier.

Slowly but surely, piece by piece, I dismantled my reaction until it was boxed up in tiny packages that were easier to deal with and send away. They are not all gone, but I have learned to manage them. I have finally found what I thought I had lost forever - peace.

The most important lesson we can learn from watching on the sideline is that we don't get to choose what happens to us, but we do choose if we suffer. Tragedies are inevitable, there is no avoiding it. But in the end, we only lose what we let it take from us.

In the face of adversity, we must make a conscious decision every day to not give our situation power over us, to realize that our sport means more to us than playing time and we are more than a number on a jersey. An injury can kill our statistics, but it can never take away the work ethic, dedication, and pride we have developed over the years. It cannot remove the blood, sweat, and tears from the turf, it cannot erase the scars on our knees. It cannot obliterate the thousands of hours we have spent on the field. It cannot eliminate the miles of sprints we have run or how hard we have pushed ourselves when we thought we could go no further. It cannot make us forget our victories and our triumphs. It cannot steal our memories from us, and it cannot dictate our attitude. Only we have that power. The hardest part is simply realizing it.

Every athlete dreams of leaving behind a legacy, but sometimes we have to learn the hard way that the best legacy we can build is one of unconditional sacrifice for the name on the front of our jersey. In time individuals will be forgotten, but the culture they help to create will live on forever.

That is one thing that an injury will never be able to take from us.