Is there anything worse than losing in the Finals?
It might seem like there’s nothing worse than losing, and it might even be true.
Just look at the faces of the players and coaches of the Phoenix Mercury after losing to the Chicago Sky in the 2021 WNBA finals.
The pain of loss reflects the depth of love, and it’s something any of us can understand whether we’re pro ballplayers or not.
Losing a job. Losing a partner.
The pain of loss reflects the depth of love.
Some will say there can be no comparison between what they consider “real life” and sports, and they might be right.
But sports happen in the real world, don’t they?
Is losing a game 'real pain'?
Athletes cry after losing a ballgame. So do their parents. So do their old coaches. So do their old teammates. So do the fans who get to know them at every stage of the journey.
If the tears are real, then the loss is real.
And anybody who would ask Brianna Taylor, Sophie Cunningham, Kia Nurse, Shey Peddy or any of the Mercury players to try to explain or summarize or contextualize or quantify or try to capture their emotions tonight doesn’t realize that those players are human beings and that sometimes it takes a while for the numbness to fade.
People with fancy degrees hanging above fancy desks where they work on fancy papers might call this empty feeling “denial.”
The rest of us just know that we’ll never be the same. We know this whether we’ve studied Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her “Stages of Grief ” or not.
The pain of loss reflects the scope of effort.
Sometimes people lose their job, and it doesn’t faze them.
Others break.
Maybe it’s got to do with weakness of character? Or maybe it’s got to do with sacrifice?
Like, going to the gym instead of going out to party? Or the hitting the library when everybody else is hitting the bar? Or clearing a space at the kitchen table after the rest of the family goes to bed, staying up late to read textbooks and manuals and workbooks, to take notes and highlight phrases and earmark pages like there would be a test at the end even when there wasn’t — especially when there wasn’t?
Those are the easy ones. Sometimes sacrifice means being 2,000 miles away when your grandparents are dying of cancer, and you have to try to hug them and say thank you over the phone.
Or maybe when you were home visiting, you didn’t give them as much time as you wished you would have because you didn’t realize that every time you saw them, it might be the last.
Maybe the person who loses their job and breaks is dealing with the realization that it wasn’t worth all that? They should have gone to the funerals. They shouldn’t have missed the family reunions. They should have quit rather than miss grandmother’s rolls at Christmas dinner one last time.