Games of Epic Proportions

As I watched the final seconds of overtime tick down in what is now known as the Albany Cup, I came to the conclusion that sports are, for lack of current creativity, da bomb diggity fo sho. Here I was, in downtown Albany, with about 9,000 rowdy Albanian college students, alumni, and innocent bystanders, enjoying the competition in front of me. It took a moment like this to realize how excitement and contentment are completely relative to the environment. I will now attempt to decipher that last sentence with more sentences. Starting... now:

To start: The Albany Cup is a regular season, division 1 basketball game between Siena College, a regular NCAA tournament participant with a growing reputation, and UAlbany, a regular league doormat with little national exposure. Slightly David and Goliathesque, these two make up the highest level of basketball in town. The Times Union Center, a building with too much capacity for it's market base, rarely gets more than 4,000 or 5,000 spectators. Arguably, Albany only gets excited about basketball this one time every year.

So, to summarize: Once a year, Albany, a city with no professional sports teams and a couple of mid major level college athletics programs, gets rowdy and excited over this one basketball game. To anyone outside of the Capital Region, the game means nothing, but to everyone in the arena, it's the game of the year.

Which brings me back to the original point. We, as Albanians, don't have access to Madison Square Garden, humongous football stadiums with pro teams, or all the excitement that comes with highly successful local teams, but because of this, we get excited for something of minuscule proportions. Does the small stature of the event on a national scale make it worse? The answer is no, because relative to the other home games each team plays throughout the course of the year which are mostly low-key affairs, this game has a boisterous, energetic atmosphere, and although it's only a bunch of people packed into a sort of small stadium watching mediocre teams play each other, it's still the most exciting thing around. I don't think it's a stretch to say that fans at this game felt MORE emotional contentment at it's completion than plenty of spectators do at pro events.

As I watched fans filter out of the arena from my court-side seat (more on the reason for this arrangement in the near future), it dawned on me that a great game had just taken place and that most fans were leaving the arena satisfied (the game was so good that I'm making a huge assumption that the losing fans were okay with it. HUGE assumption.) Fans weren't satisfied because the game had great national implications, but because they had attained a feeling of satisfaction from watching Albany's singular important college basketball competition go down to the wire, with David pulling out the upset win. It warmed the hearts of only a relatively few people, but that was good enough for them. Or, better put, us.