A Devilish Way to Lose

I've seen some awful losses in my lifetime. Naturally, as a New York fan, losing that 3-0 2004 ALCS lead to the Red Sox comes to mind, the 2001 World Series Game 7 loss with Mariano Rivera on the mound holding the lead, and the 2002 Giants vs. 49ers playoff loss when the Giants couldn't hold a 24 point lead late in the third quarter. I've also watched terrible losses as where I was rooting for the eventual winning side, such as the 1986 World Series Game 6 "Bill Buckner" game, the 2003 ALCS Game 7 Red Sox blown lead and the Monday Night Football game in 2000 where the Jets somehow came back from a 30-7 deficit to beat the Dolphins.

A couple of nights ago I was flipping between the Yankees vs. Tigers game (great pitching by Phil Hughes), the Mets vs. Marlins game (another bad loss by the Mets), the Game 7 Rangers loss to Capitals (Henrik Lundqvist single-handedly kept the Rangers in the series against a far superior Capitals team), and the Game 7 matchup between the New Jersey Devils and the Carolina Hurricanes.

Granted, the stakes weren't cosmically large as it was a first round matchup, but the Devils were 1 minute 20 seconds away from winning Game 7 and moving on to the second round, when they not only managed to let the tying goal score, but about a minute later the Hurricanes scored the winning goal and took the series. Yikes, that's pretty awful. As the final horn sounded, the Hurricanes looked elated like somehow they had miraculously snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. As for the Devils, they looked completely stunned.

I remember a "Peanuts" cartoon strip where Charlie Brown excitedly tells Linus about a football game he had just seen where his team had made an amazing comeback, winning the game which they were surely going to lose. As an ecstatic Charlie Brown relates the final parts of his story and shares about the elation of the winning team and waits for Linus' reaction, Linus pauses and then finally asks, "How did the other team feel?"

But that's sports for you - every "miracle" for one team corresponds to a "meltdown" for another; every "comeback" for one team is another team's "choke". As fans, we live with the reality that the odds say that at the end of the season, your team is probably not going to win it all. But it sure is fun to watch anyway, isn't it?