Sean Guest Blog: Celtic's Loss

It’s raining here in Melbourne today (not a big surprise) so this is probably partially coming from that.

The Celtics loss is hitting me particularly hard. Though I know that it is rather ridiculous to be upset about something like this, I think it is more than just the standard Boston sports disappointment. My favorite quote about sports starts to put this in a bit of context I think:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
--- Roger Angell

I watched the Celtics games online while sitting on a folding chair at a picnic table in an unheated manufacturing plant outside Melbourne, and it felt like I was sitting on my couch at home, or sitting with my brother, or my mate Bret, or my dad. For Game 7 about 5 of us from Boston who are here for the plant start up were sitting around a laptop, cheering and yelling, surrounded by confused Australians. It felt…right. When the Celtics were up by 13 in the third quarter I started thinking about parades, about “We Beat LA…Again” T-Shirts, and about calls home to talk about the win, the parade, the mood in Boston.

When they lost, I think it hit me for the first time that I am really away. Watching this run by the C’s, being connected with all my friends and family in the US as we watched the games at the same time, has kept me “in Boston”. So I guess for that I have to thank the Celtics. I just wish I was going to be watching a parade tomorrow and buying a “We Beat LA…Again” T-Shirt to keep the feeling going.