Elastic Hearts

Ever since the red light went on to end Game Five, and with it the Sabres' season, I've been struggling to put into words the incomprehensible yet familiar mix of sadness, disgust, and longing that's taken up residence between my ears of late. Last night it came to me, and I started digging through my old computer in search of the piece that triggered my deja vu.

At some point in high school, I remember reading a short story by John Updike that was originally a Boston Globe article around thirty years ago. Searching for it online hasn't turned up anything, but I did manage to find the paper that I wrote for the assignment that accompanied it. A cursory reading of the essay told me two things: Number one, my writing was a lot more verbose and fundamentally correct in 11th grade. But more importantly, the excerpts I took from the article confirmed that I was indeed thinking of the right piece.

That article was called "The First Kiss," and it was printed shortly before the BoSox season opener sometime between 1970 and 1980. Like most pre-title Sox writing, it was heavy on heartbreak and "woe is me." Which is fine, believe me. I'm Irish. Nobody appreciates a good dose of self-loathing and martyrdom like we do.

The thing about this article that really resonated with me, the reason that it suddenly popped into my head again this week after almost five years, was the way Updike described Boston's fans. Long before they became Red Sox Nation, International Consumer Entity, John Updike referred to Boston faithful as a "many-headed monster with an elastic heart." Every offseason they declare: "Enough...you'll never get us to care again, Red Sox." But that is, of course, a lie.

My point in all of this is the following: I'm slowly coming to the realization that it takes a special kind of person to be a Buffalo sports fan. You truly do need an elastic heart. Anything less and it would be impossible to move past the failures that have defined us as a sports city. This year's playoff exit was a gut-check, for sure. The sad reality is, we've been through far worse. I guess the thing that feels so foreign right now is that unlike so many other times, we saw this one coming. We had time to accept it and start moving on before the playoffs even ended. Even people who believed that coming back from 0-3 was a possibility acknowledged that it probably wouldn't happen.

So here we are, about a week into our offseason, and for the first time I can remember, I'm okay. I shouldn't be "okay" this soon. I should be railing on officials, thinking of creative ways to say horribly inappropriate and offensive things about the Senators, making Dany Heatly DUI jokes...but I'm not. I should be swearing off the Sabres for a while, and reconciling with them in a couple of months. But I'm not. I'm not doing those things, telling those lies, that normally come at the end of a season. I guess I'm wondering why that is...

Could it be that all of us, all of Buffalo, has just gotten used to it? Have our collective tragedies on the rink and on the football field really made our hearts, to steal from Updike, elastic? Maybe we know better, and maybe our hearts don't break anymore...they just sort of bend.


Actually, I don't really think that's it at all. I think it's more the case that we, as a city, have taken the sports world's best shot. Over and over again, square in the jaw. Right now, Buffalo is less like a perpetually heartbroken Red Sox Nation than say, Brad Pitt in Fight Club. You know the scene I'm talking about, the one where Lou discovers that his basement is being used for the titular club's meetings. He then proceeds to beat the holy hell out of Brad Pitt in an attempt to convince him to leave. Pitt doesn't leave, though. He just lays there, taking Lou's best shots and laughing. Finally, Lou realizes that this guy is indeed the kind of lunatic who is willing to sit there and get punched in the face until he gets what he wants. As he comes to this realization, Pitt grabs him and screams through split lips: "You don't know where I've been, Lou! You don't know where I've been! Just let us have the basement."


So if you've listening, sports gods, just...just let us have one, one of these years. You really don't know where we've been.