"We Love Being Fans, Even When It Hurts"

For as long as I can remember, it always seemed that I was a fan of a team that was losing. It started off with the Montreal Expos, and then eventually, I moved onto the New York Mets.

We had a great year in 1986, and I was fairly certain at my age that it meant we would have three or four years where the New York Mets would dominate and win the World Series every year. That was not the case.

Living in the Phoenix, Arizona area, I became a fan of the Phoenix Suns, a tragedy that still has not found a happy solution.

I had moved away from Arizona by the time the Diamondbacks moved there in 1998 and never really felt a connection to them, especially with the Mets winning in 1999 and 2000. Or at least, trying to win.

On the football side of things, I had been an Arizona Cardinals fan and a New York Jets fan. That just had failure writ large all over it. Eventually, I got married, and my wife and I had two wonderful daughters and a son. As my son grew up, I started to introduce him to the absolute futility that is being a fan of the New York Mets. Since our last name is Lemieux, he decided that he was going to throw himself completely into hockey and become one of the biggest Pittsburgh Penguins fans around.

Right around the time that the Pittsburgh Penguins stopped winning the Stanley Cup on a regular basis. Combined with the New York Mets and the New York Jets, my son has really known only complete and total suffering in sports.

It builds character, and it helps you to understand that when you do win, you have to be very graceful, because there’s always a line of people who are suffering greatly, because they never get to win. Although to be honest, I don’t even know who those people are anymore because it seems like everybody else wins and I don’t.

So this year, when we were watching the New York Mets ruin their season in May and June and then watched Aaron Rodgers get hurt on the fourth play of the game, we were really hoping that the Pittsburgh Penguins would kick it off with a win against the Chicago Blackhawks. They ended up blowing it in the third period, and my son went upstairs to his room saying, “Well, I guess I know how this season is going to go.”

We will still watch most games and we will still cheer for our teams, knowing full well that the Jets will probably not go to the Super Bowl, and that the Mets will probably not go to the World Series next year, and that the Penguins' chance of going to the Stanley Cup gets slimmer as their stars get older.

It doesn’t matter. We like being fans, even when it hurts.