Waking up is hard enough, but to discover this happened last night really bummed me out:

Not because I was rooting for South Africa¹, but because I went to bed during halftime (?) with the idea that what ended up happening was essentially impossible. It is, literally, the best performance by a chasing side in the 50+ years of the format and I missed it because I had a long day. Falling asleep is something that sometimes happen fairly often to me, even with sports set in my timezone (or at least the continental United States) but outside of a single instance — the Celtics 25-point comeback against the Lakers in Game 4 of the 2008 NBA Finals, which I woke up for just in time to see Ray Allen crossover Sasha Vujačić to seal the game — nothing exciting has ever happened in any of those instances.

What made it even more frustrating² is this wasn’t a situation where I fell asleep, but one where I chose to go to bed. I had been, before RSA found itself entering into the 300s during their innings, willing to stay up through the end of the game. There’s a shifting scale for me when it comes to what I’m willing to do/”put up” with in terms of watching sporting events, obscure or otherwise, and this had passed the test, before I ended up throwing away the grade on a technicality.

It’s an internal exam that has been a major part of my sportswatching life since the beginning of it. For context, with something like darts, my level of “willing to watch” is “pretty much any time, in any language and in any format,”. On the other end of the spectrum, like with the NFL at this point, it’s more along the lines of “Will Bad Bunny be there?”. Those parameters are not set in stone — I used to be fairly fanatical about watching football all weekend, even if my preference did skew towards college — but are standards that have been established over the years, with an underlying rule that I am willing to try anything at least once.

This is because watching a sport for the first time is always a fun experience, even if I don’t love it at first sight, as I try to treat it like the opportunity to enter a world with which I am not directly familiar and is one my favorite ways by which I get to be reminded that we all contain multitudes³. Any viewings past that initial one, though, become both an engagement with what’s happening and a kind of tolerance/taste test for exactly what I’m willing to endure to get my fix of televised competition in between episodes of Good Eats and DuckTales.

It’s not that sport have to earn my affection every time day like I’m some kind of withholding sports narcissist⁴, but that I always reserve the right to reclaim my time — or, as Taylor Swift taught me, preserve my energy — for the people and things that are worthy of it. Which is where the NFL fell off, as a series of compounding events⁵ made me realize that not only was it not a sport I was interested in watching as much any more for entirely meritocratic reasons, but that many of the people involved (from players to owners to commentators to even fellow fans) made me hate even thinking about it.

At some point, when you’ve been involved with the same relationships to sports long enough, you think you’re set for life in terms of the sports you’ll be watching. But change often comes at you gradually, then all at once, and when things shift far enough one way or the other — whether its because of the effect kids and their interests have on your life, the way your job (or lack thereof) adjusts your schedule and availability to be in front of a TV watching something or just realizing you deserve something better — you can find yourself wading through the unknown not just out of want but necessity.

So, as new sports enter my life as part of this project (and from the osmosis of my friendship with Brad, whose, uh, … I’m trying to find a nicer word than “addiction” … predilection towards watching random shit at random times would be inspiring if it were not so frightening) I’ve begun to have to test the waters again. And while finding my sea legs, it’s led me to reevaluate what exactly it is I’m looking to spend my time with as opposed to just diving into whatever makes me feel less alone in the moment.

For something like handball⁶, it was an almost immediate no. While there’s no one thing that helps me click with a sport and want to see it again, it felt too much like what I’ve watched before, but in a way that felt disconnected from what attracted me to those things n th first place. Also, having played it way too much in high school — as mentioned in the space before, Brad and I’s hometown was weirdly obsessed with the sport and created an intramural after school spectacle of it while we were there and, as such, became a sport that we played an inordinate amount in gym class — the mystique was largely gone.

And, maybe worse, there was no spark, even when trying to play the most game recent video game release⁷. On the flip side of this particular coin sits Australia Rules Football: It’s a fun game, looks great and bring a lot of excitement to the proceedings, making me feel things I’ve never felt before in a way that made me hope we could form a real connection, but is overloaded with so many other factors around it that it makes it difficult to maintain more than a casual, distant relationship.

Timing, in particular, just hasn’t worked out with Aussie Rules, as the games all happen either somewhat late at night⁸ or impossibly early in the morning, and the schedule itself that includes so much variance in terms of who is playing, when and where — between what is usually four days of games, each with different broadcast windows and the bye weeks, while broadcasting on two different networks in America(only one of which I have access to) seemingly at random — make it almost impossible to form a meaningful connection with any one team or even player. As much as I want it to work out with the AFL, I just don’t see it in the cards right now, though I still hold out hope that we can come together some day to create something special.

There are also, of course, the smaller sports with whom there could probably nothing more than a passing fling. Squash, snooker and volleyball all fit in this category, just simply the kind of sporting relationship where it’s not quite an outright rejection like handball, but would require such a change in circumstances and deep commitment to rearranging my life that I can’t really imagine it working out for us.

It’s not that I hate any of these sports, to be clear, just that with limited time and energy, along with even more limited money, applying to myself in the ways I need to in terms of honoring my standards as it relates to commitment make it so I think I only have time to add one or two more sports to my rotation of weekly watches, at least for now.

And one of those is, based on my viewing history over the past few months, definitely going to be rugby. As I’ve said before, rugby offers a very specific thing that almost no other sport on earth would be able to fulfill, which to rekindle, in a way, my love for (gridiron) football.

While it’s not a perfect one-to-one replacement — in no small part because the competition structure is so epically fucked that following along with what could be my favorite players and teams⁹ is only slightly less daunting (and not significantly less expensive) than trying to engage with Aussie Rules — it does an adequate enough job of filling in the hole left by football, while offering so many other things that I find pleasing that I often find myself thinking about rugby and smiling, wanting to build what we have into something sustainable for both of our futures.

The sport I’ve straight up fallen in love with, however, is cricket. You may have noticed, considering how much I’ve written about it here — though I promise, next week’s newsletter will almost certainly be about something else, especially with the women’s Six Nations starting next weekend, because nothing says “supporting women’s sports” like waiting until after Women’s History Month to write about it two weeks in a row — but it’s the kind of connection to a sport that makes me feel whole.

Which is why what happened last night felt so sad to me. Not only did I miss the greatest comeback¹⁰ in the history of the format, I did so after I went out of my way to give cricket a special place in my life. I’ve done as much as I can to carve out a spot for it in nearly everything I do (including playing it with my daughter, having bought her a children’s set up in the weeks after the historically great Bluey episode brought it into our lives). I’ve even started following podcasts and subscribing (and also pitching) to the major publications that cover the sport so that I can know everything about it so things can work out for us over the long haul instead of me getting off the train at the first stop.

But instead of sticking to my own principles¹¹ of never giving up, I decided it was time to call it a night because I didn’t believe anything worth seeing or doing was going to happen. Though, while I can’t go back in time, I can learn from what happened and not make the same mistakes again.

Losing the opportunity to see one of the more impressive athletic accomplishments of my lifetime is something that, while it will have no material effect on my life, has changed me and my relationship with the world in general, and cricket in particular. It’s made it clear that believing in what people are capable of achieving and becoming is worth your time and effort, and the fight against the forces that will prevent you from doing so is worth waging, even when your enemy is sleep. And it also reminded me of a fact I learned a long time ago, which I will bring with me going forward:

While Nothing Good Happens After 2AM¹² ,a lot of good shit can happen between a little after 930PM and just before then.

Looking for the links to these games or hoping to expand your palette of potential viewing options? Check out our Streaming Schedule page for the latest in daily/weekly updates and schedules.