So, this Sunday, the crown jewel of Northwestern's athletics department, our women's lacrosse team - you know, the one that's No. 1 in the country, has won its last 40 games as well as the past five consecutive national championships, yeah, that one - plays the No. 2 team in the country, North Carolina, last year's runner-up, at their beautiful lakeside field, at noon on what should be a beautiful Sunday afternoon. A Northwestern sports fan probably should be busting some sort of legume over something like that, but I find myself at best indifferent.
A question I often ask myself is whether I like sports or just certain sports. I try to think its the latter: my evidence is that professional basketball is my favorite thing ever invented in the universe, and I plan on watching upwards of six games this weekend when the playoffs kick off. I'll watch pretty much any game I can on League Pass Broadband. It's a full-blown obsession. I know more about the Association than any other topic, and if I saw Miami Heat swingman Yakhouba Diawara walking down the street, I would not only think to myself "hey, isn't that Miami Heat swingman Yakhouba Diawara?", I'd also remember that he's French, he thinks he's a lot better at shooting threes than he really is, he played for the Nuggets for like two years, and is as far as I can tell the only NBA player who went to Pepperdine. It's an obsession. Meanwhile, if it's not Sunday, I don't really care about the NFL, and my childhood love of baseball has waned into me liking the Yankees a lot and being sort of indifferent about anything else baseball-related. I like to think there's something special about the sports I love, and something less fascinating about everything else and my disturbing ability to consume basketball confirms that.
Then, there's the dark side of me that occasionally comes out and makes this seem bitterly untrue. During any sort of Olympics, I'll spend all day and all night engrossed in badminton, speedwalking, or curling. My crippling Streak for the Cash addiction has led me to research - and then watch parts of - Cricket, college hockey and lower level European soccer matches. (I consider soccer to be a sport I like a lot, but we're talking Portuguese SuperLiga here.)
Somewhere in that list of sports I feel shouldn't speak to me is women's lacrosse. I haven't been to a game here at NU, so perhaps I'm ignorant, but my experiences seeing people play lacrosse lead me to believe this isn't far off from the truth. Furthermore, I find it hard to find much interesting about a team that is clearly, clearly the best team and essentially doesn't have a chance of losing most games.
NU women's lacrosse players are about as close to someone who is the best at what they do in the world as anybody you'll ever meet. They're the best players at the highest level of competition in their sport, and that genuinely impresses me, and I'm proud they represent my school, and I hope they win every game they play.
But as a sports fan - even a Northwestern sports fan - there's nothing that really grabs me about the entire situation.
I'll probably be convinced into checking out a game this weekend, if the weather's nice - we'll see how my feelings change. I plan on keeping you guys sparsely updated on how they do throughout the season because basketball and football are doldrummy right now, so, stay tuned.
Tell me how you feel.