Substitute "Bears" for "Jets"

In this week's New Yorker (though, unfortunately, not posted online), Adam Gopnik writes about the trouble with watching football on TV and the more general malaise that surrounds the game these days. He references several recent books written about football, including Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, and concludes on, what struck me as, a familiar note.

What makes the bald rooting interest forgivable, maybe, is the near-certainty that the ideal game is never, or almost never, going to happen. The essential experience of watching sports is experiencing loss; anyone who has ever consoled a twelve-year-old after a Jets loss, or been a twelve-year-old in need of consolation, knows this. Since loss and disappointment are the only fixed points in life, maybe the best we can say is that pro football, like anything else we like to watch, gives us a chance to organize those emotions into a pattern, a season, while occasionally giving us the hope of something more. The Jets don't always lose--just nearly always. When they do better, we feel better. That's the margin, or sideline, on which we live.

Familiar? Anyone?