Chris Graham: Much ado about nothing important

“I can’t believe the Nats.”

My friend, Eli. He’s a huge Nats fan. Sorry, fan of the Washington Nationals baseball team.

The Nationals, the Nats, are struggling big time right now, a year after a magical run to the playoffs was cut tragically short.

“A bunch of chokers, man.”

Eli, a fan of the Nats, also loves to hate the Nats.

“I mean, every flippin’ time we have a chance to close somebody out …”

Eli is also under the delusion that he’s on the 40-man roster, and at any moment might be called in by Nationals field skipper Davey Johnson to pinch-hit, pinch-run or throw a scoreless inning out of the pen.

“What, you’re mocking me? You’ve got a sabre tat on your left shoulder.”

That, I do. A blue sabre, with an orange V.

“You claim it’s your alma mater, but that’s the athletics department logo. The school logo is the Rotunda, dude. You’re not foolin’ anybody.”

Good point. I bled some orange and blue last summer when the anarchists on the Board of Visitors were trying to turn good ol’ State U into the University of Phoenix at Charlottesville, but generally the school love (and self-loathing) is reserved for athletics.

Which, for my favorite teams, never turns out the way we want it to, ultimately.

A friend who has similar misgivings about what’s important in life as me that I hadn’t seen in a while showed up at a game recently with a long mane of hair.

“Not going to cut it,” a mutual friend told me, “until UVa. wins a national championship.”

“In football,” he added, quickly, meaning our buddy will be the only guy in the assisted-living facility 40 years hence with a mullet.

I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong all these years in thinking that people who aren’t into sports have it all wrong. My reasoning has been that following a sports team closely, using the collective we in reference to its exploits and failings, being light as a feather happy when it wins, falling into a deep, existential funk when it falls short, is healthy because doing so makes one become part of something bigger than one’s own self.

More and more these days, I’m starting to think that it’s all just a big waste of time and energy better spent, well, doing anything else, really.

Sometimes your team wins; sometimes your team loses. At the end of any particular sports season, some team wins the grand championship; all the others begin looking forward to next year.

And the point to it all … well, see, that’s the problem. I don’t think there is a point anymore. I used to think that there was, but I’m pretty sure now that there never was a point, actually.

“Point is, the Nats need to get rid of Dan Haren, and make a trade to get one more power bat in the middle of the lineup.”

Good ol’ Eli. Still hard at it.

Incidentally, I’ve also come to realize recently that there’s really nothing at all to politics, either.

These are not healthy realizations, in case you’re wondering, for a pundit well-versed in sports and politics to come to.