Dear Paul Revere
What would Paul Revere think about our modern sports of hockey, basketball and baseball? Nate in the Heights explains what it's like for us to have all three of our major spring-time teams go down in a heap of flames.
Updating our greatest fleeting guest on the most important details of modern life in Medford
By Nate Rubright
Dear Paul Revere,
I’m sad. And no, it isn't because only one out of every four days achieves non-coat temperature.
I am sad because of sports.
In my contemplation of this sadness I realized that this particular type of feeling is something that may be wholly foreign to you in the eighteenth century. That kind of blows my mind really, considering sports are one of the top three modes of existence of folks around here (hungry and driving impatience being the other two).
To provide a little background, in the spring we normally get the best part of three sports seasons. The playoffs of both basketball and hockey coincide with the beginning of baseball. The flowers bloom and we get to decide which heroes and villains to name drop out of context to our coworkers. In recent memory all three of Boston’s representatives in these sports have had intriguing teams with chances to make it pretty far.
Not so much now: Both playoff teams went from promising to bounced-out in lackluster performances, and our baseball team fired its championship caliber
manager mid-series after a harrowing start. It is going to be a long summer of me trying to figure out some compelling hobbies to make up for the evenings I would otherwise be watching TV.
What are basketball, hockey, and baseball, you ask? The first two are based around getting an object into a net and the last one is hitting a ball with a stick. They also span the spectrum of extreme physical contact to basically none at all.
From the brief research I’ve done it seems like your sport equivalent was "tavern games" because collective team-based sports were generally not popular due to the puritan discouragement of secular vices. While those ambiguous-sounding games might seem fun, I don't think they had quite the emotional valence of watching a superstar return from injury only to be played too many minutes and have to ride the bench for a pivotal game seven against what was, until a little under two months ago, a disaster of a Philly team.
Anyway, a general malaise will be hanging over the city as the hopelessness of several months of futility dawns on all of us who need sports to elevate our lives from mundanity. I guess in a way it is a relief to know that folks lived full lives here without this type of weight sitting heavy in their subconscious.
Thank you for receiving this letter, it provided a brief amount of catharsis to your emotional correspondent,
Nate in the Heights
Nate Rubright is a Medford resident.
