Arranging a series of miniature football helmets on the floor of my early childhood bedroom was easy enough.

They were players in a game from my own head, inspired by whatever real ones I’d watched the previous Sunday and reproduced on my carpet. So, you know, fun.

Don’t get me wrong. You can bet anything I made sure those balls of cheap plastic that I was pretending were living, breathing people were going to be lined up in tight formations, damn it. Obsessive tendencies and all, I loved sports, with and without spectacle, real or imagined.

In fact, when my friends and I would run out of actual sports to play, I’d invent some other game in which a ball could be thrown at something and we could all hit someone.

Idiot boy.

I still love sports and I certainly fell in love with the grind of writing about them here — mostly because of what I learned here.

Me, idiot boy, grew up a little and learned a lot. I learned that the NCAA takes advantage of the dreams of teenagers. I realized that sometimes players make more money than others because they’re marketable — not necessarily better. And I came to grips with the fact that, no, not every player on every team could be treated the same because they’re not.

The shine came off sports in much the same way I smashed it off those toy helmets. A lot of this happened while I was in Syracuse, which was good.

What’s not, is that as I became a reporter and not a fan, I started to resent fans in a way. Fans truly are suckers and to be one requires ignoring so much of reality.

Sports at the highest levels, including college, are about money. Who has it? (The schools, the teams, their sponsors and boosters). Who doesn’t or didn’t? (Many times, the players). And how to get more of it: by selling more tickets at higher prices, snagging better endorsement deals and convincing people that team vs. team is of worldly importance.

People believe it. Those people are fans. They get excited out of their minds and do things like hate Chris McCullough for wanting to feed his newborn child, rip B.J. Johnson for leaving a team he wasn’t going to play much on and questioning the manhood of players who sit with injuries that will affect the rest of their lives.

They perpetuate the things about sports — again, usually money — they pretend to hate.

The reality is that your favorite player might be a sh*tty person, athletes have to make decisions that are much harder than “So, recitation or flip night?” and Jim Boeheim’s going to play the 2-3 zone forever.

All this has resulted in me asking myself one question so many times. Why am I here? It’s a good thing to ask yourself, no matter where here is and what you’re doing there.

A lot of times I’ve asked myself this while in the Carrier Dome covering a game.

“Guys, it doesn’t matter,” I’ll think, surrounded by people wearing orange, which matches nothing. “The world won’t change if Rakeem Christmas, Trevor Cooney and Michael Gbinije all have good nights, Syracuse’s offensive line magically heals or Chris Daddio wins an average amount of faceoffs.”

But someone’s world will be changed. Sports have that imaginative power. I realize that I’ve gotten so close to so many athletic somethings so dynamic that I can, but don’t, become desensitized to human performance that really is worth reveling in. Basically, I’m lucky.

And yeah, these games can and do change peoples’ lives. While I do I wish we were smarter about how we consumed them, I love that sports make us stupid.

They made 4-year-old me roll around in laughter with my pretend football helmet friends, they make you wear so many bad outfits and horribly rearrange your priorities.

But that kind of stupid is good. Because whether you’re stupid in love, sports or both, you always know why you’re there. You want to be.

So I am.

Jacob Klinger is the development editor at The Daily Orange, where his column will no longer appear. He can be reached at jmklinge@syr.edu or on Twitter at @Jacob_Klinger_.

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Published on April 27, 2015 at 10:37 pm