Sports talk Thursday with Lauren Hunter- That die-hard loyalty

Well Georgia sports fans, let’s get it over with. Let’s go ahead and talk about it, then we’ll put it behind us like a bad ex-boyfriend.

Georgia sports teams have been schlacked recently. Not just schlacked. Demolished. Embarrassed. Twitter exploded. That sort of thing.

Blame it on the curse of Georgia sports, blame it on your lucky shirt getting washed. Whatever you wanna blame it on, it happened. And for those of us who have constantly endured the mocking of our friends for years, we just hung our heads and cried.

The first thing my brother, who is a card-carrying Florida fan, said to me after THE GAME (so we’ll call it) was, “it doesn’t matter whether Florida wins or loses, Georgia lost, and that’s all that matters.” This was the weekend when Florida went on to lose to LSU. It didn’t matter. Florida moved up ahead of Georgia in the AP rankings. And I discovered a new high in lows.

On top of all this, the Georgia/Florida game is in two days- and I’m certain I’m not the only one who’s a little afraid UGA has more to fear than ghosts and goblins.

The point of this post isn’t to moan even more about the loss(es). Facebook has done enough of that already. The point is to challenge us all to answer the question: at what point is enough enough? a.k.a when do we stop rooting for the currently triple threat of sports failure that is Falcons/Braves/Bulldogs.

Some of us may hide our red, black and blue for a bit while we lick our wounds. Others might change their game day ritual completely. All of us are going to have to endure ridicule from the SEC, NL East and NFL.

But I would venture to say NONE of us are going to change teams. We swear, curse, kick over chairs and get drunk when there’s a horrendous upset. Then the next game comes around and we can’t help ourselves. We’ll never be able to quite pull the trigger on turning off that ESPN notification or stopping our arm from moving when the Tomahawk Chop starts.

For many of us, it’s in our blood. We were wrapped in a red and black blanket from the womb, or looked at Turner Field for the first time as a young T-ball player. Our brains automatically associate the changing of leaves with the bright lights of a stadium, and our hearts with the loved ones we were surrounded by at that time.

We can’t separate the team from those memories. They’re one in the same. But we can distinguish between the good and the bad. Our team could be the National Champions one season, and the worst of the worst the next. Either way, those who are truly die-hard loyals can’t let our teams go. We can’t pick another team because we’ll never be able to associate that new team with the one ingrained in us. It’s that darn die-hard loyalty.