So, I know this guy. He’s married, with a great job and a ponytail. He’s funny and smart. And he is fiercely committed to a life of stagnation, aggressive in his resistance to any form of personal growth. He says, essentially, with his actions and choices, “I will not step into adulthood, I will never be what anyone would call a good husband, I will remain passive in all things except in the protection of my unreliability, my immaturity.” And after several years of walking closely with him, fingers crossed, hoping he’d eventually wake up, with absolutely no sign of life, I chose to set boundaries and move away from the front row seat I had to his destructive, depressing complacency. I did this like a grown up with appropriate self-worth.

I have loved the Dallas Cowboys since before I went to kindergarten, some 45 years, and for the last 30ish, they are easily as committed to their own mediocrity, actively, aggressively choosing against their own growth, as this guy I know. He is disrespectful of me and my time. So are the Dallas Cowboys. Probably neither would acknowledge this disregard, clearly neither cares at all about my presence in their lives. Yet, for some reason, I can’t set boundaries and move away from this football team.

I wonder why that is.

If you went to a restaurant, one you called your favorite, a restaurant that was AWESOME for years and years, but is now…not. You’ve gotten food poisoning there several times, you haven’t had a good meal for years (the pictures still look terrific, but the actual product bears little resemblance to those pictures), the prices rise exponentially while the portions shrink. I bet you would go elsewhere, you would find a new favorite restaurant. If your dish detergent stopped getting your plates clean, no matter how long you had used it, you would choose the next one on the shelf.

But not with our sports teams. Not only do we often get saddled in our youth with a team that we are forced to hold on to into and through our lives, but there is some kind of pride associated with that adherence. If we behave like intelligent adults and look elsewhere for a better product, we are judged harshly, called “bandwagon” fans, and viewed with disdain.

Lifetime sports fandom is a sucker’s game, eschewing rational decision making, replacing our own personal value with self-loathing masochism. Sports are America’s true religion and the idiocy of faithful fandom is our tithe. We sacrifice our happiness on the altar of the organization, league, or association.

That guy I mentioned earlier (as you probably guessed) might just be my impossible dream of how I could just set a boundary and walk away from the Dallas Cowboys. Yesterday I wondered to whom I would go, for the foreseeable future. Maybe the Chargers, Justin Herbert is great. The Minnesota Vikings have the best uniforms, but they’re also terrible, so it’s a lateral move and why do that? I like the Texans enough, but I found myself immediately, reflexively, shooting that suggestion down because they’re too close to Dallas, as if I was breaking up with a girl and couldn’t date her neighbor, because what would she think??? Honestly!!

It was then that I realized that I am a complete lunatic. I might as well like the Jets or Cleveland Browns. The Dallas Cowboys lose, most times in spectacularly disappointing fashion, at the most heartbreaking times… and I guess I am doomed to go down with that ship every year. That first paragraph sounds great, boundaries and self-worth sound nice, but who am I kidding? I’m a Cowboys fan (and an imbecile) for life.

I have been a Dallas Cowboys fan for longer than I can remember, since probably before kindergarten. My father had few other interests and I was his boy, so loving sports was a requisite in my home. You choose your teams wisely and think you’ll stay with them forever, like your first best friend or first kiss. Best friends came and went, girlfriends passed though, but the Dallas Cowboys moved in and have forever lived rent free in my head & heart. Now I’m 47 and not 4, no longer call them “us,” but last night when they lost again in the playoffs, I was shocked by how disappointed I was.

I have come to believe fandom is an irrational insanity. What other arena would you continue to patronize and, in the worst cases, identify with a product that’s quality varies this wildly. If you only bought Dawn dish detergent, then it changed formulas and no longer cleaned your dishes, you’d find a new detergent. If you really loved Chipotle, how many cold, rotten burritos would it take before you stopped going? Would you still stand in lines because you had a good one 30 years ago? How many stale, crushed bags of Doritos would you buy before you found some new chips? How many times does Lucy have to pull the football, sending you flying through the air, before you stop having her hold???? In fact, if you had 30 unbroken years of losses with your spouse…

I left DirecTV, with extreme prejudice, paying the early cancellation fee, after 1 long year of terrible service. With the Cowboys, 1 long year sounds like a dreamlike utopia.

I used to ride or die with the Detroit Tigers baseball team, and if you’d ask me, I’d still tell you they’re my favorite team, but it doesn’t affect my life at all. I have no idea how many wins they had last year or who their current shortstop or manager is.

I understand children chaining themselves to a team, because to a kid, everything and anything is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. But leaving that behind, with the rest of the grade-school trends and fashions, sounds like the right way for an adult to behave.

And yet. When Dak Prescott threw a 6 years pass in the middle of the field deep in their own territory as time expired, my heart broke again. I don’t know why. I don’t know Dak Prescott or Ezekiel Elliott. I don’t think Jerry Jones would be a particularly nice person – but maybe he is. That’s the point, how would I know? I’ve never met him. Why does my Sunday evening (and Monday morning) have anything to do with the fibula of Tony Pollard?

When I was 4, I loved the big beautiful star. That’s why I chose the Dallas Cowboys. When people ask me why, that’s the honest answer. Danny White and the star. But a logo is hardly a reason to handcuff myself for the rest of my life to a perpetually good (that’s what makes it so heart-breaking – that every year, we think “maybe this is the year,” like a legion of Neanderthals) professional football franchise.

Maybe I’m done. But I’m not.

Maybe I’ll pick a new team, or better yet, no team. Maybe I’ll just watch the games as a completely impartial party, enjoying the athleticism and the game. But I won’t.

It’s not loyalty, either, like other broken people say. It’s a masochistic disorder. But it’s my masochistic disorder. It’s our masochistic disorder.

But next year will totally be our year.