Loss
I was in an IEP today, and a mom shared that her son was home watching the World Cup Qualifier match between Italy and Bosnia and Herzegovina. When Italy lost and didn’t qualify for the World Cup, he had a huge breakdown and was upset for hours about it.
I said to myself, “Well gosh, I have been there.”
I cried hard for hours — tears and all — when the Cubs lost to the Padres in 1984 in the playoffs. In 2003, when the Cubs blew a 3–1 lead to the Marlins, I was depressed for days. And when the Bears lost in the NFC Championship game to the Packers in 2011, I was so upset I refused to watch the Super Bowl that year. I know other adults who experience the same thing. We even check in on each other — “Hey, check on so-and-so, their team lost.”
I didn’t want to be dismissive of the mom and her concerns, but it made me wonder: what exactly is this behavior that so many of us suffer from?
Turns out, there’s a name for it. Psychologists call it fan identification — the degree to which a person ties their own sense of self to a team. When the team wins, we won. When the team loses, a piece of us loses too. Sports psychologist Robert Cialdini coined a term for that first feeling back in 1976: BIRGing, short for “Basking In Reflected Glory.” It’s why fans wear the jersey the Monday after a big win. The flip side is what a lot of us struggle with — the inability to shake off the loss, to let it roll off us like it’s “just a game.” For highly identified fans, it isn’t just a game. It’s personal.
So when a teenager cries for hours because Italy didn’t qualify, he isn’t being dramatic. He’s doing what a lot of grown men do every October and every January — just without the benefit of years of practice pretending to be okay about it.
And maybe that’s worth sitting with for a minute. What looks like an overreaction in a kid is often the very same emotional wiring we carry into adulthood. We just get better at hiding it behind phrases like “long season” and “wait till next year.”
Sometimes the most human thing we can do is recognize the behavior for what it is, give it a name, and say to the kid — or the grown man — “Yeah. I get it. That one hurt.” Or you get trolled and made fun of by fans of another team, for example all of the White Sox’s fan at school made fun of me and the Cubs loosing when I came back to school, but that is a story for another post.
What does the thing that “devastates” you — the loss, the cancelled show, the eliminated team — actually reveal about what you value and how deeply you connect?