I won the World Series and all I got was this skewer stand

IMG_0327,
originally uploaded by mchughtie.

It's amazing the power of sports, especially when possessed by the beauty of the underdog. It resonates with all our ideas of justice and order. We can collectively stick it to the man by embracing the merely ridiculously rich rather than those clean-coifed winning machines with their private jets. Suddenly we find ourselves trading in those baby birkenstocks we bought our children for a nice, new "Yankee Hater" hat they can wear to school. We can send mass emails out of the latest round of Yankee fan jokes. (How Yankee-esque of us, really.) Vicariously losing felt noble, but winning? Euphoric. And I loved it too, I really did.
But what of that charm in hoping? Can we get that back?