Over the holidays, I went to a minor league hockey game. I’m not a particularly knowledgeable hockey fan; I did not know anything about either team (one of which was named the “Pee Dee IceCats”), and the only really spectacular athletic moment I saw involved a woman somehow catching a T-shirt launched from a cannon despite holding a beer in each hand.

The result of the game did not matter at all — to me, to most of the fans in attendance and, seemingly, to the participants. (One bench player spent half the game talking to a young woman sitting behind the boards.)

And I must tell you that I had an absolute blast.

I drank multiple cheap domestic beverages, I got on the Jumbotron, I did the wave, I screamed at strangers to fight each other while wearing deadly weapons on their feet, I high-fived a baby. It was a pointless game, and I have already forgotten the final score. None of this stopped me from having a big dumb grin on my face from the opening faceoff.

I went to a game, I had fun, I went home and I moved on with my life.

Which is to say: I had a normal fan experience.

It was new for me. I kind of liked it.

You — The Athletic reader, person who loves sports so much that they will pay to read about it — are like me, in that we are sickos. We are fiends for this stuff. We start watching sports obsessively when we are very young, and we never stop, which means the history of sports, its winners and losers, its inspirational heroes and dastardly villains, its glorious triumphs and soul-shattering defeats, is the history of ourselves.

Who wins and loses these games — particularly if one of the teams playing is one of our teams — is the point of everything, the central organizing principle, a decades-long narrative that defines who we are and where we stand in the universe. We know every player on every team, we know who the up-and-coming prospects are, we know everybody’s salary cap and NIL situations, we can drop stats from games 25 years ago out of nowhere. When I finish writing this column, I will devour some quarterback transfer portal charts, I will engulf SP+ rankings, I will fret about whether my team has a chance to win a game that will not actually take place for nine months.

This is the life we have chosen, and it is the life we are stuck with. We would have it no other way.

This sort of vein-popping-out-of-the-forehead intensity is what makes the sports world, and specifically the college football world, go around: It’s why Notre Dame fans are still screaming at random people on the street, why “Lane Kiffin” is now an expletive, why Michigan fans, deep down, know they wouldn’t change a thing from the last five years because they got their championship out of it.