The dark days didn't used to be this way

The passing of the Super Bowl is like Groundhog Day for me. You know that glorified rat isn't going to bring warm weather, no matter what he sees. We're stuck in the middle of February no matter how you slice it. In the case of the Super Bowl, it's the last distraction before coming to terms with having no baseball until April. Consider this my sports purgatory.

In case the fact that I spend much of my time posting on a Yankees blog wasn't confession enough already, allow me to admit happily that I am a first-degree baseball junkie. During the regular season I watch or listen to at least part of every single Yankee game - loving each minute.

For example, this is an actual exchange that I had with a girl I'd been seeing for a couple of months this past summer, during the June 14th shellacking the bombers gave the Mets:

Her: Is this game really that much more interesting than our conversation?

Me: Yes.

Did I mention I believe my passion for baseball may have something to do with my current status as single?

Watching football from November through January isn't as much fun for me as watching baseball, but it helps soothe the absence I feel. I enjoy the sport. I would enjoy it more if they played every day and didn't have a clock determine who won so many of the games -- you know, if it were more like baseball -- but I do enjoy it.

Once the football season ends I'm left with nothing, except free time to contemplate the life decisions I've made that turned me into the kind of person who tells a beautiful woman she's not as interesting as a 15-0 ball game in June. (In my defense, she wasn't very interesting, and we were lighting up Johan Santana.)

The worst part, though, is that my life didn't used to be this way. There was a time when my sports schedule was perfect. In November, just when the Yankees were ending, the Knicks were beginning. (And in April, just when the Knicks were choking away their season, the Yankees were beginning.) It may seem like a long, long ... long time ago, but the Knicks were good once, and people cared about the outcomes of their games.

My love of the Knicks, although a distant second to my love of the Yankees, was more than enough to get me through the dark months of winter. They never had the Yankees' history, and the team always had a penchant for losing in the most gut-wrenching fashion possible, but they had heart, and a cast of lovable characters to follow. Sure, the Knicks always played the part of the Red Sox in their feud with the Bulls, but the team was relevant, and it gave me something to enjoy watching every second or third night of the week in March.

Today I struggle to watch basketball at all. I need a team to follow or I rapidly lose interest in a sport. It's not just that the Knicks are awful, or that they are one of a handful of criminally run sports franchises, it's also that they have systematically avoided drafting or signing a single interesting player in a decade. My respect for basketball makes it impossible for me to be excited about David Lee or Danilo Gallinari, while my loyalty to my team forces me to remain a Knicks fan, just interested enough to know what's going on with the team, but not wanting to punish myself into watching their games on a regular basis.

Once upon a time I had a perfect sports schedule: the Yankees in the summer, Knicks in the winter, and the Giants on Sundays (after November, of course). Today, now that the football season is over I can only wait, and hate the man responsible.