O’Gallagher’s Opinions

I am a New Yorker. Throughout my tenure at Middlebury I have always identified myself as such. Most evenings in the fall I gathered around the TV in the Hepburn Lounge with all the other New Yorkers (and, those poor souls, the New Jerseyites as well) to root for our teams, either the Giants or the Yankees depending on the night. Throughout the season, I think we all came to recognize those unwanted intruders, the Patriots or Red Sox fans, who joined us because either their teams weren’t on or their seasons had ended a little prematurely, and inevitably spent the entire night hating on anything and everything they could. For incessantly tainting what is the holiest day of the week for me (Football Sunday), these unnamed detractors quickly jumped to the top of my Sunday night sh*t list.

As the end of February rolls around, the number of Americans suffering from seasonal affective disorder skyrockets; but this isn’t a medical column, and no, I’m not talking about the one with the simple UV light fix. I’m talking about that feeling that lingers until around April, when Opening Day miraculously wipes away all memories of the dreaded sports doldrums. This time of year, with baseball season long over and the last embers of football season burning out, many find themselves a little lost, perhaps trying to substitute some basketball or hockey here and there to tide them over until at least spring training. But unfortunately for all the hockey fans out there, even the NHL is now out of the equation since the league has been suspended for Olympic play.

With the advent of the Vancouver Games, a new crowd has started forming in the lounge every night: some of the old faces, some new, the Just-Outside-Boston kids I tried to avoid all fall, and the random kids from the exotic locales Middlebury loves to court, all rooting for the red, white and blue. But while the games have certainly been a welcome distraction for me, they have seemed to leave something more to be desired.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Olympics, both winter and summer, and am essentially glued to the TV for 17 days every two years. And I’m just as much for the red, white and blue as the next Joe Six-pack. But I think in a small way, my enjoyment of the games has been tainted by something I can only identify as akin to Toqueville’s American exceptionalism. Whether or not this is true, I have this idea that few other countries can compete on the level that we can, which seems in some ways to sap my enthusiasm.
While watching the U.S. women’s hockey team crush everyone else, I got little pangs inside, yearning for a good NFC East matchup or a little AL East rivalry. But then I remembered, we’re not actually good at everything. True, we’re good at our sports, football and baseball (neither of which are now in the Olympics), and we can hold our own on the ice (even though most of “our” players in the NHL are actually Canadian), but there are a lot of sports out there we can’t even compete in.

So when you feel like you’d rather go pick a fight with a JOBer about trading Babe Ruth than watch Shaun White win another gold medal (sorry, broboarders), flip the channel to ski jumping, watch us get our asses kicked (for a change) by the Austrians, and get a little national pride going. Remember, you may be a New Yorker, a Bostonian, or even a New Jerseyite, but for 17 days, we’re all red, white and blue.