What do you do after your team is eliminated from the NCAA tournament?

Oftentimes I envy the casual sports fan — the fan without any true allegiance — because oftentimes sports are a cruel venture. You suffer far more than you rejoice, and almost every time, the season ends with a loss. Out of 68 teams, only one will exit the bracket with a victory.

Last year, the Illini didn’t make the NCAA tournament. They didn’t make the NIT. They played their regular season, one Big Ten Tournament game and then went home. And life was peaceful. There was no stress or anxiety waiting for the next matchup. There was no in-game screaming or gray hairs or any sort of heartbreak because there was no game at all.

That was not the case this year. But I don’t need to tell you that.

The ultimate question of sports fandom is, why? Why do we give a group of people — a team — our full, unreciprocated allegiance? Why do we do it with such a passion?

I challenge the theorists to develop an agreed-upon answer for why anyone would put themselves through such tumultuous torture because I haven’t heard a good reason yet.

I don’t know why I’m so passionate about my teams, about the Illini. I just know that I am.

I am. I do live and die for a few hours each game night. I do associate years of my life with heartbreak and others with triumph. I do lose my voice at games. I do break things. I do go to bed angry.

And I will relive Sunday’s Illini game in my head for months to come because I know the desired result was within reach, even though I don’t fully know why I wanted that result at all.

There was a moment in high school when I was talking to some friends about the previous night’s Chicago Cubs game. As is the usual course, the Cubs crushed the small piece of my soul I had given to them so many years before by losing in heartbreaking fashion in the ninth, with the lead, with two outs, etc. I said: “We always do this. We always find a way to lose these games.”

A teacher passing by interrupted the conversation with a shout. 

“We? We? What do you mean ‘we’? Are you on the team?”

Some people don’t get it, especially casual fans like this sad teacher. Obviously, I am not on the team, but that team is very much a part of me. I told the teacher that no, in fact, I was not a player on the Chicago Cubs because if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it.

That’s my team. There really isn’t much else to say.

The agony of Sunday night — is it better than not having a game at all? Rationally, yes. There would be no heartbreak, no sadness, no disappointment. But to the thousands and thousands who felt exactly as I did over the weekend, the answer is a firm no.

Extreme emotions are fundamentally human, fundamentally part of life, even if that emotion is a negative one. I went to bed Sunday upset, but I went to bed having lived. Just the chance for that fleeting moment of bliss is worth it.

What do you do once your team has been eliminated from the NCAA tournament? You do what you always do. You move on. You wait for the next chance.

Jack is a senior in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected] and @JCassidy10.