Every now and then even the most effortlessly perfect among us run up against a string of disappointments. The past few days have been fraught with disappointments for me.
The first disappointment came Wednesday night as the Yankees won the World Series. I’m from Boston, so the only thing worse than the Red Sox losing is the Yankees winning. No longer could I use my joke about feeling bad for all those 7-year-old Yankees fans who had never seen a championship in their lifetime. To put it in perspective, when Joe Torre left the Yankees, I felt like I had run downstairs on Christmas morning and found a pony. Seeing the Yankees win was like finding a used shovel to clean out the pony’s stable. Merry Christmas.
I went to sleep after the game and woke up for senior registration, when I had one of my worst ACES outings ever. ACES is supposed to get easier when you’re a senior registering first, right? Wrong. At one point Thursday morning, I was on four waitlists. After 45 minutes of additional bookbagging, I had pieced together a workable schedule, but it was far from my ideal Dream Senior Spring Schedule.
Then on Saturday, I made the journey out to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Stadium to cheer on the Blue Devils against UNC. If you need a reminder of how that went, flip back to the front page of this newspaper. The loss wasn’t entirely surprising, but it was still a reality check for some of the biggest-dreaming fans.
For me the biggest disappointment was when my New England Revolution were knocked out of the Major League Soccer playoffs. Yeah, that’s right, I’m an MLS fan, maybe the only one on this campus. Without dwelling on the intricacies of the playoff format, New England was knocked out of the tournament by one goal.
Life, and spectator sports in particular, provide ample opportunities for broken spirits. We get excited for things, and circumstances beyond our control get in the way of the result that would make us the happiest.
Of course, not everything in the last week has been a disappointment. President Obama decided that the census is allowed to count gay marriages. Regardless of your politics on the issue, this should be seen as a victory for accuracy—why even bother with a census if you’re going to take deliberately false data? If a state recognizes a couple as legally married, you might as well count them as such instead of pretending they’re single.
And of course, the Wall fell. Not the Berlin Wall, which fell 20 years ago—I mean that spray-painted wall that was built on campus last week commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. I guess I never fully understood how building a wall separating most of residential west from everything to the east really commemorated another wall coming down, so when parts of the wall began gradually falling over towards the end of the week, I saw it as a proud sign of reunification.
If I’m looking for the silver lining, I could say that I’m looking forward to the classes in which I did end up enrolling. Also, we had beautiful weather for the UNC game, and aside from the poorly designed, impossibly congested concourse, Kenan Stadium was actually pretty nice-looking.
When it comes to the Revs, though, I don’t want to look at the bright side. We’ve made the playoffs in 10 of the league’s 14 seasons, and we’ve made it to three finals, but we’ve never won the championship. A part of me thinks that I’ll never see the Revs win the MLS Cup in my lifetime. And when there is so much soccer out there on TV of significantly higher quality than the MLS, sometimes I start to wonder why I sit through these games and let myself get so emotionally invested.
But no, I told myself I’d end the column optimistically. In sports, there’s always next year. And really, we don’t even have to wait that long—in soccer, I can jump straight into the European leagues that are just hitting full stride, and here at Duke, we are only days away from the tip-off of basketball season. The losses are only temporary disappointment.
And hey, as far as registration goes, I could be a student in the University of California system. Out there, you’re fighting to get enough classes to maintain the full-time student status you need for your financial aid package to kick in. If you’re really lucky, you might even graduate in under six years.
So here’s to a senior Spring that will actually be my last semester here.
Bradford Colbert is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Monday.
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