Intensity

Many folks watch sports in general and their corollary playoffs in particular for the rise they get as a result of the action. That's okay, of course. Nothing wrong with a little excitement in life. The intensity sure can ratchet up the heartbeat.

Intensity...the older I get the less I like it. It's okay when you end up winning, but I have an increasingly more difficult time handling it when losing. That's on me, I readily concede, and not sports and games per se, but it does have me purposely ignoring many sporting events. I consciously did not watch the late Detroit games from the left coast simply to avoid the effects of it. I was glad I did when I learned of that awful call on Hossa in game three of the Wings-Ducks series.

Yes, that's probably the ninety-sixth time I've mentioned that incident, but that's part of my point. I need to be able to let go of things such as that. Because, in the end, it's just a game.

Yet that, obviously, brings into question any reason why we should watch and promote sports at all. If they're just games, we should not with any justification feel any intensity in any form with regard to them. Even I will allow that if we don't feel anything at all, then it likely isn't worth the effort. So I suppose the best solution is (mark this day, friends, for you'll rarely if ever hear a right winger [hockey pun!] like me say this again) somewhere in the middle

Anyway, I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's not worth the trade-off: intensity for the sake of basking in the glow of victory or misery in the advent of a loss. That won't stop me from watching sports, to be sure, but I find that regular season games are much more enjoyable that postseason matches precisely because less is riding on them. They are more the true diversions we need than the aggravation they can be in the postseason.

That, maybe, is the real bottom line. See our games as timeouts in our lives, to rejuvenate and reflect, to get away from the the daily grind for a moment and infuse a better and more healthy intensity for the things in life which really matter. Perhaps they are best suited as something to help us gain perspective, and allow us to more rightly know and appreciate the best things in life.