Introduction

Growing up, I was an unathletic kid at the bottom tenth percentile for both height and weight until my sophomore year of high school. When I was five years old and my parents signed me up for rec league soccer, I took an unexpected header in one of the games and proclaimed in a pouty fit of range that I never wanted to play soccer again. I played in my local youth basketball league from first to eighth grade where I held a proud career high of 10 points over 80 games played and was (deservedly) benched in the final minutes of the last game of my basketball career. These anecdotes are meant to frame the question: why do I, someone that didn't get along with sports as a kid, love them so much as an adult?

I

My Dad was a chef, and while my sister and I were growing up he would put out large spreads for NFL football on Sundays. My entire family was, and still is, vegetarian, meaning that the available eats would consist of lots of fruit and vegetable platters alongside a main course of vegetarian ‘football food.' Philly cheesesteaks made of seitan, mimic chicken seasoned well to be used in tacos, veggie sausage turned into hot dogs, the works. My personal favorite as a kid was the ‘cheese bowl:' a dome of mozzarella-stuffed pizza crust surrounding a molten pool of cheese seasoned with garlic and onion. When the Bears made the Super Bowl XLI he, predictably, made a large spread for us as we sat down to watch the hometown team play in the championship. The game began with a wide-angle shot of the stadium that contained a barrage of flashing lights coming from the audience's digital cameras as the Colts kicked the ball to Devin Hester, who had terrorized the league as a rookie kick returner. Hester caught the kick at the 8-yard line. By the 25-yard line, he had shaken eight Colts on his way to the only kickoff return touchdown in Super Bowl history. He passes a stumbling Adam Vinatieri without much thought and streams into the end zone as the crowd noise turned into a crescendo of cheers. The Bears would go on to eventually lose this game, but I remember my parents being ecstatic as their team started off one of the biggest games they'd seen as fans with a punch in the mouth to the Colts.

II

During my senior year of high school, I quickly became enamored by the place that would eventually become my alma mater: Minnesota's Carleton College. One of my closer friends at the time was a new freshman there, and the drip of campus life she provided helped me look forward to the future. An aspect of Minnesota that I picked up was rooting for the Vikings -- as started to watch football with a closer eye, I was looking for a team to root for and my determination to go to school in Minnesota led me there. That year, the Vikings had a promising squad headlined by a dynamic wide receiver duo in Stefon Diggs and Adam Thielen and a stifling secondary with cornerback Xavier Rhodes and safety Harrison Smith, making my transition to rooting for the Vikings easy. The Vikings would finish 13-3 that year and lock up the second seed in the NFC which matched them up against the Saints after a bye week. The Saints were up 24-23 after a Will Lutz field goal with 25 seconds left in the game seemed to ice my first season rooting for the boys up north. However, the Vikings had other plans as the Vikings dialed up "Buffalo Right, Seven Heaven" with ten seconds left, a play that had Diggs shake towards the right sideline. Third-string quarterback Case Keenum's throw was a bit high, which caused Diggs to jump. This jump inadvertently caused Saints safety Marcus Williams to both miss Diggs with a low tackle and hit his own teammate Ken Crawley, giving Diggs an open lane to the end zone which walked off the game. Both Joe Buck and the Vikings' long-time announcer Paul Allen gave iconic calls to the catch, which would be dubbed the "Minneapolis Miracle." I remember sitting in my senior year dorm room ecstatic, knowing I had just witnessed something incredible and cementing myself as a Vikings fan. I've been an active fan of the Vikings for nearly ten years, which is the longest stretch of sports fandom I have.

III

At Carleton, I witnessed the turnaround of a college football program that went from consistent zero- and one-win seasons to one of the best stretches in its nearly 150-year history. The flame igniting the school's interest in football was a slow burn as the program slowly became better and kept stacking upon itself. On the final play of regulation and facing 4th and 20, quarterback Johnny Singleton threw a prayer towards the end zone that was misjudged by the entire Concordia College defense and caught by first-year wide receiver Garrett Siff. In overtime, a Concordia two-point conversion was intercepted, and Carleton drove down the field on the ensuing drive to win against an opponent who had bested Carleton in 21 out of 22 previous meetings. Students stormed the field and the photo of a triumphant Trent Ramirez surfing amongst the team etched itself in MIAC, and D3 football, lore. Campus was livelier than I had ever seen that night, with revelry and celebration all around.

The memories of the comeback made its way into my brain and kicked its feet up, knowing it would live there forever. It's something I look back at with great fondness and the play inspired me in part to write in-depth about Carleton's football program. My interviews with Carleton football alum and coach Tom Journell about the "MIAC Miracle," as the comeback was dubbed, was a treat that I was able to enjoy years after the last player left the field that day. "A Recent History of Carleton College Football" is, in my opinion, one of the best blog posts I've written on this site.

IV

My first introduction to baseball was the KBO, the first sports league to continue play after the COVID-19 pandemic that I was aware of. There were many nights in college where I would stay up doing homework while KBO played on my computer in the background, subtly teaching me the rules of the game. This interest eventually translated to the 60-game 2020 season in July of that year and simmered while I took my favorite college course: Advanced Classical Mechanics with Dr. Jay Tasson. My love for this course coincided with more baseball watching to create a desire to create my best work to date: "The Modern Baseball Pitch: A Physical Perspective", my senior thesis that constructs a mathematical pitching model alongside talking about the "sticky stuff" that took over baseball that year. I took a complete 180 from my usual chronic procrastinator tendencies for this assignment, opting to finish the paper over winter break of that year and having to trim the original draft by nearly a third of its length. I am getting a tattoo of a diagram from the paper in July and the assignment is woven into my existence at this point -- I truly loved working on it.

I've been in Chicago for four years, and in the time I've spent here I have fallen in love with the White Sox. I feel this is a natural extension of the dive I took into the sport for my thesis, and in engaging with the community of Chicago I've enjoyed my time at Rate far more than I have at Wrigley. I've attended some heartbreaking White Sox losses, but with each time I stepped through the gates of Rate Field it slowly began to become my favorite place in the city. The 2026 Chicago White Sox season is still ongoing, but no matter how it ends it will have a special place in my heart. From a brutal 41-121 record two years prior to their current record of 38-32, the two-year turnaround of this team is one of the most remarkable in the history of the sport. A perfect storm of a potentially transcendent free agent in Munetaka Murakami falling to the White Sox for relative pennies, strong prospects like Sam Antonacci and Jacob Gonzalez rising through the minor leagues, and huge steps by second-year players like Colson Montgomery, Chase Meidroth, and Grant Taylor, was brewing within the organization.

One of these prospects is Braden Montgomery, a strong hitter that I managed to see in Double-A this April for the Birmingham Barons. There, he had an OPS above 1.100 and was raking anything that came his way. I saw he got called up, snap-bought a ticket, and took the train down to Rate to watch his debut. The crowd's atmosphere was electric and the game versus the best team in baseball by record, the Atlanta Braves, came down to extra innings. On the last out in the bottom of the tenth, Montgomery stepped up to the plate as the crowd stood up. He took a strike on a changeup up the middle before making great contact with that same changeup on the next pitch for his third hard-hit ball (exit velocity of 95 MPH or higher) of the day. The ball sailed over the head of left fielder Mike Yastrzemski and bounced off the top of the wall before falling directly in the hands of a fan, marking the fifth time a player has ever hit a walk-off home run in their debut and only the second time it's happened in extra innings. The moment could not have been scripted better, with the legendary Bob Costas on the call. The ball is only a homer in two stadiums: Rate, and Daikin Park in Houston. I was standing with my hands on my head as Montgomery rounded the bases, incredulous as to what I just witnessed. This is just one moment in a group that have defined these White Sox season up to this point, including Edgar Quero's walk-off homer in extras versus the Cubs to secure their first series win versus the evil up north since 2022 and Sam Antonacci's 57-foot inside-the-park home run versus the Diamondbacks. For the first time in my three-year tenure as a White Sox fan, I feel truly hopeful for what's to come.

Conclusion

I like sports because they instill hope in a tumultous world. There’s a reason that the baseball barnstorming tours and college football teams of the early 1900s were so successful in gathering fans, and why cities happily continue to host teams of all sports leagues: they create a sense of pride rooted in community and an outlet to pour energy into. Sporting events are one of the few shared realities that thousands of people can experience at once, regardless of status or background. The strangers high fiving me over something on the field we saw together or the Umarells I’ve sat next to passionately talking about their time as fans create experiences that I treasure. I’m blessed to live in a big sports market with three teams I am either a fan of or tend to root for in the White Sox, Bulls, and Bears, meaning I can seek out and very easily find these moments. I find it very important to engage with the community one lives in -- going to sporting events and talking to fans is a great vessel to do this though, in part.