Why I Cried a Little When The O's Lost Game 5

I cried a little bit when the Orioles lost game 5 of the ALDS to the Yankees tonight, and it had very little to do with baseball. I don't care very much about baseball. I find the season to be too long to give any kind of gravity to games in general. Baseball is my husband's game. He loves it.

That said, I followed, at least in some abstract way, the Orioles' "magical" season this year. Baltimore was fired up. Maryland was fired up. My HOME was fired up.

A lot of people move away from home to live their adult lives, and there is nothing tragic, or pitiful, or particularly interesting about it. I don't ask, in the day-to-day, for people to recognize me as a non-Orleanian. I've no problem with embracing at least the superficial culture of this place I have adopted.

At the same time, I'm not sure there is anywhere else in this country that is as outside-culture-sucking as New Orleans. New Orleanians, and particularly New Orleans transplants with a hard-on for the culture down here, are eager to discredit the uniqueness or flavor or, goddam it, validity of other American cities. Of regions. Of other countries, for godssake. I wish I could count on my fingers the number of times someone from New Orleans has explicitly said that Nola is the only American city with any culture. I cannot.

So, Growing weary of people telling me that Marylanders can't cook or are a bunch of yanks (SOUTH of the Mason Dixon line, motherfucker, though I'm not sure it's something to be proud of), I feel just a tad attached to Maryland phenomena that unite my home people. Particularly in an election year full of just the most annoying shit, The Orioles, with their miraculous extra innings wins were a bright spot.

I recall the last time I watched Orioles playoff games. I was an awkward moody little thing. I remember home. I remember my mother being there fixing me an after school snack while I guess Mike Mussina pitched? I don't know, I remember cheering Moooooose. Like I said, this isn't about baseball.

This is about seeing people I love from home uniting over a sports thing, and it's about feeling valid and normal and human for missing the people I grew up with, and the hills, and my family, and the culture, the real, valid, actual culture that informed my childhood and that still informs me today.

I was sad to see that O's season end, because it had equated to all those feelings for me for a while, and, you know, baseball is pretty great, too, when it matters.