Ah yes, the proverbial "morning after".  Time to begin the recovery from another night of living the sports highlife.  The life of a sports fanatic is not for the weak of constitution or the faint of heart, because along with the highest of the highs the highlife is littered with heartbreaks and heartaches like a minefield.  We sports fans must pick ourselves up off the floor more often than a one-legged drunk guy at a discotech.

And falling flat on our face is all a part of living and dying with our team.

Get a group of sports fans together at a local bar and the gathering quickly turns into a roundtable of comparing old scars.  Like back in the day when motocross magazines would have photos of some dude wadding it up real bad under a bold print caption "Crash and Burn", we love to share our pain with others of our kind, and there is some sort of therapy in sharing those past wounds.

Helpful tip: it is sometimes better to have a song like "Moving in Stereo" by The Cars or some other psychedelic tune playing in the background when reading my blog entries.

You see this relatively fresh scar on my ego?  Yeah, that's from the Bears losing to the Colts in Super Bowl XLI.  Rex Grossman's late pick six to seal the game for the Colts cut me real deep.  I'd like to expand further on this scar but it's still a little tender.

This hole in my heart?  I got that from the Cubbies historic collapse in the '03 NLCS.  Oh man, that one darn near killed me.  Forget Bartman, if Alex Gonzalez doesn't boot that grounder, then Mark Prior and the Cubs get out of that disastrous inning.  That entire Game 6 nightmare at Wrigley is gonna haunt me for the rest of my days.

Busted up psyche and broken fortitude?  All happened during the Arizona Wildcats 2000-01 basketball season.  All the emotional drama that the team and the fans went thru with player injuries and Coach Olson losing Bobbi to cancer and then the team fighting and clawing to get to the Final Four and then to the championship game  ....  only to lose to freakin' Duke!  Ugh!  It wasn't supposed to turn out like that.

Cuts on my mental health?  Basketball again.  The '92-'93 Arizona Wildcats easily won the Pac-10 finishing 24-3 overall for the regular season and securing a 2 seed in the West Regional for March Madness.  Then the Wildcats promptly marched out in the first round and lost to 15th seeded Santa Clara.  I would spend the next four days wandering around campus muttering to myself and getting in arguments with pigeons.  I'm really not sure but I think I flunked two exams in that period as well.  Although I can't entirely blame the basketball team for those.

My crushed confidence?  Oh that happened with the '93 UofA football team.  1993 was a tough year.  Arizona has (to this day) never sent a team to the Rose Bowl, but with the stifling Desert Swarm defense of that '93 team everything was smelling like Roses all season long.  Finally, the tipping point came in the next to last regular season game against Cal in Berkeley.  Win that game and a trip to Pasadena was practically secured.  The game began with a gloriously dominant first half in which the UofA built a 20-0 lead.  No way in hell anyone scores 21 unanswered against the vaunted Desert Swarm defense!  Rose Bowl here we come baby!  What followed was something directly out of a Stephen King book.  The Cal Bears did not score 21 unanswered points, they scored 24 unanswered points, and ruined everything by a score of 24-20.  And I crumpled like a squashed beer can.

The burn scars upon my soul?  Those are from the '84 Cubs.  Sad to say but those childhood wounds never completely heal, you know.  I remember my tears after that awful moment when the Padres eliminated my beloved Cubbies in Game 5.  The hurt from that is like it all happened yesterday.

I would guess that all sports fans have similar scars, and we can each relate to those wounds.  It's like a rite of passage every fan must make.

Old saying is "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."  That's no lie right there.