grace

People call being a sports fan a one-sided relationship. You give a team decades, and it doesn’t even know your name. Then you see a video like this. An 81-year-old man in a Brewers jersey, crying, with his wife next to him, watching his team win the World Series. The Brewers came to Milwaukee in 1970, when he was about 25. They made the World Series once, in 1982, and lost in seven games. He waited 56 years, through decades of losing seasons, to see this. You don’t see an 81-year-old in that video. You see the kid who started rooting for them. The psychologist Daniel Wann has spent years studying why fans stay. His research found that identifying with a local team gives people real connections: the friends you watch with, the strangers you high-five, the shared language of a city. In one of his studies of older fans, with an average age around 71, people who identified more strongly with a local team reported feeling less lonely. So maybe it’s not as one-sided as it looks. The team never learns his name. But it gave him 56 years of people to share it with, and one night he’ll never forget.