How should you respond when the fever seizes you, as it does each spring when playoffs begin, and someone caringly says, “Relax. It’s just a game.”
The problem’s in that “just.” Yes it’s a game. But what’s a game?
We are symbolizing creatures. Almost nothing simply is what it is, including family and friends. They tend to stand for your worth, what you deserve, or don’t. Jobs and income stand in for value and respect. The weather reflects your mood, or some revenge the world is taking on you. When a thing merely is what it is, that’s a rare, mystical moment of icy, isolated clarity.
What is this symbolizing, linking everything to other things? It stems from a sense of universal connection, nothing exists alone, it came from what’s out there, and cycles. If you’ve ever been alone with a corpse, you knew instantly it wasn’t the person you knew. It’s where they once hung out. But they, or their components, have dispersed … wherever. As Yeats described gravediggers: “They but thrust their buried men/ Back in the human mind again.”
So when we symbolize, linking things to others, it isn’t just a bold act of imagination, it reflects reality beyond our flawed sense of individual isolation. And presto! The team, reaching back to glories and disasters, and ahead to similar futures. More specifically, it resonates with a marketing cliché, Leafs Nation, which, B.S. aside, indicates the potential and reality of community.
It’s what all religion and most politics traffic in, and tribalism and nationalism build on: an underlying connectedness that is our existential lot. Does it cheapen our deep structural sense of the connectedness of all things and beings, to associate them with a pop star or hockey team rather than an ancient faith or a redemptive historical struggle? I don’t think so. Any noble thing can be cheapened or tarnished; seemingly trivial achievements, like winning a first round, can be celebrated solemnly and joyously. It’s our fate to make connections, because we sense or intuit they exist.
I say this as someone who’s spent a lot of life immersed in traditional faith as well as philosophy; and also as a Leafs fan since I was eight, and my mom stayed up to leave me notes on who won that game along with the three stars, and has also held a share in Leafs tickets since 1973. And I say to you: anything we formulate to explain such profound matters will founder pathetically on the inadequacy of our mental and linguistic tools; it will sound silly and shallow, no matter how seriously and sonorously it is intoned.
(I once sat in a grad seminar on German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ideas about “being.” The presenter said portentously: “A kind of crackling, then … POW!” The prof, a world ace on such things and also a Jesuit priest, leaned forward and softly queried: “POW … er?” No, said the student. “Just … (whispering) pow.” I mean, c’mon, these are sketchy ephemera you can do little more than gesture at.)
So games qualify as much as religions and Big Ideas as ways to engage the odd fact of being in the world. To the phrase, “just a game,” you could reply, “Yes, but what is a game? And might it be more mysterious than you thought?”
I do feel though, that the sense of connect to the team and its fans, past and future, runs even deeper than the fierce yearning to win. It’s why fans go into the streets to see and embrace each other, when the team occasionally triumphs. And keep in mind that only one team, of many, can win each time.
As Blake wrote — I think of it as The Great Reminder — we all were “made for joy and woe/ And when this we rightly know/ Thro’ the world we safely go.”
If you get no joy at all, you’ve just cause to complain, but if it’s been a mix, you’re right where you’re meant to be.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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