What makes you a fan? I just wrote somebody this:
I actually like sports. I like watching good players play games well and a good game is a damn fine thing. In 2006, I cheered watching a Watertown baseball comeback, a Syracuse football romp over a weak team as well as got to shout "Yale sucks" at a hockey game. I just like being a fan. I think there is a whole world of imaginative experience that is separate from being a homer, that can feel happy for the good play by the other team, that can just enjoy that you do not have to do something within the fan experience. Now, when a club goes some way to enhance that experience - by respecting a place like Fenway or celebrating its veterans of the past (something the Leafs can never get right) - that makes it better. And I will wear the hat but I will wear plenty of them. And Davey even has a Yankees woolie cap as a reminder.But I am also a fan of good craft brewers and sometimes of flawed tragic people of more consequence than myself. Being a fan you can choose between, on one hand, the PR spun absolutes of a homer who sleeps under licensed and branded sheets and blankets and, on the other, the reality of the thing before you. Much in life is like that. Being a fan is good practice for reality.
