Thrill of sports captivates us at young age and keeps us coming back

We touch on this theme a little bit in the WhackBack section elsewhere on this page: just how fanatical fans can really be, especially at the polar extreme of splendid success and feeble failure.It’s a question I’ve never been able to quite crack in 35 years as a professional sportswriter (and 51 years a sports fan).But I try.

Unabated, I try.Sure, we all laugh at the old Jerry Seinfeld bit about sports mostly coming down to rooting for laundry.Still, if you’ve ever seen Jerry at Citi Field living and dying with his favorite baseball team, you know he doesn’t really mean that even a little bit, even if he happens to have a proclivity for orange and blue.The fact is, we all have our origin story as sports fans.

We all have that moment that separates the before and the after — the “before” being that last blissful moment when you don’t care about who wins or who loses, who wins the MVP, who should be the manager, who should be the captain, how soon should the coach be fired …And the “after,” when all of these things are the most meaningful things in the world to us.It usually happens at an early and an innocent age, so none of these new compulsions get in the way of anything more important than dedicating more hours of free time to sports than to video games.I’m sure you have a story like this one: My father, out sick from work, nevertheless feeling strong enough to meet me at the bus stop in the afternoon of Oct.

10, 1973, all so he could inform me that the Mets had just beaten the Reds for the National League pennant.I had little idea what a “pennant” was in that context — I knew they were things that looked like flags that dad had hung on the walls in a hopeful effort to let osmosis do its magic and transform me into a sports fan.But why would I care if the Mets had won one?It made my father very happy, so there was that.

I got home and saw the ballplayers celebrate, so there was that.And suddenly in that moment, I had a thousand ...