Seasoning The Fans

     The 2016-2017 sports season has been crazy good. The 2016 baseball ended so crazy, well get to that shortly. The 2016 football season ended just as crazy as the baseball season, if not crazier. Now we are in the midst of the playoffs for both basketball and hockey. You may be thinking, “Why not wait until the end of both playoff runs?” Easy, we all know that most likely paths to the championship rounds, especially the NBA(I am hoping we have someone other than LeBron in the Finals). Sports are as unpredictable as Donald Trump’s hair style.

    Let’s start off with baseball. We had the 2 best times playing on the last night of the season in November. The question would be: Which team would end it’s long drought? With the exception of the city of Cleveland, most people were routing for the Cubs. What a journey they had to the World Series. It was so motivational that Theo Epstein was named the most influential person in 2016. Game 7 was one of the better baseball games I have watched in recent history. Not only was Game 7 crazy, the Cubs were down 3-1 and came back to win. I can only imagine how crazy the city of Chicago was when the last out was recorded.

   Baseball and football are very similar in that when teams are down by a certain amount it is improbable for them to comeback. That’s what happened with the Patriots. Atlanta had a 25 point lead going into halftime. The defense was playing great enough to hold a lead. The only issue is that the Patriots had Tom Brady as your quarterback and Bill Bellichick as your coach. As Yoda said to Luke “Do not underestimate the power of the dark side.” No team had ever come back from such a large deficit in the Super Bowl. It couldn’t happen. My thought’s were “Is this really happening?” After Tom Brady had the game winning touchdown in overtime, I said “this just happened.” That’s when all the GOAT talk started(that’s a conversation for another time).

  If basketball and hockey can duplicate the finishes that baseball and football had to their seasons, then it would be a successful 2016-2017 season. If LeBron James does not make it to a 7^th straight finals, I would say that the basketball season would be a success with just that instance. Hockey has been set up for TV ratings and for early ratings. If they have a competitive Conference Finals and Stanley Cup finals, no matter who makes it, then the NHL will have a successful season.