Recent Events Fill Mariners Fans With Unexpected Emotions
When the M’s eliminated the Jays, I quite literally didn’t know what to do. I ended up cleaning the kitchen, a task I generally loathe. The nature of the game was a part of that confusion – a warm, comfortable variant of confusion – but the biggest part of it was that I was not fully aware that baseball could produce feelings like this. 21 years of failure constrained my emotional response to critical games because it constrained my imagination. I was not prepared for a world in which the M’s could come back from 8-1 down in Toronto to win. And thus, my brain did not really process that fact.
It was fitting, then, that the image I will always carry with me from that day was photos from T-Mobile park at the M’s watch party. Thousands of people, watching a bonkers game on the jumbotron, with shoes perched on their heads. It is simultaneously relatable (“sports!”), and completely ridiculous. Faced with perhaps the most unlikely comeback in 20 years after 20 years of missing the playoffs in a variety of cruel ways, people spontaneously responded to the blessed nonsense of it all in kind. By raising the nonsense, by wallowing in it, basking in it.
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