The Beginning!

Welcome friends! Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how much fun it would be to start a sports blog. This idea started out as the simple thought, “I text and talk about sports enough that maybe I should start writing about it.” But, like many ideas before it, this thought was pushed to the back of my mind. The thought kept coming back though.

One day last week I mentioned this to my brother, Matthew Long, and good friend, Danny Scansen, and they also thought this would be fun. Between the three of us, we will be bringing you posts about Seattle sports, the Pac-10 and basically anything else we want to write about. It’s an honor to write with these two people that I respect and aspire to be like.

Needless to say, I’m extremely excited about this. It doesn’t really matter to me who or how many people read this, I selfishly admit that I’m writing for myself more than anything. This is because sports fascinate me. How do we come to this deep connection, that can lead to tears of joy or months of frustration, with a team full of players that we’ve never met? After 19 years of fandom, the strongest conclusion I can come to is that sports are our escape from reality. And no matter how harsh reality can be sometimes, I can turn on a football game (or almost any game) and that brings the potential to forget troubles. Does this always work? Of course not. And I’m not saying that sports provide a way to run from problems, when the games over it’s right back to the grind, but sports act as a break from a fast paced and frantic life. Because they do this for us, we become attached. Just like a good friend who’s always there to hear your problems or cheer you up, sports are usually there to get us out of the funk a bad day brings.

I’ve been going to Husky football games for as long as I can remember, and haven’t missed a home game in over 6 years. Recently, I was asked if the Huskies running out of the tunnel before the game ever loses it’s excitement. That got me thinking, I can’t remember a time when the team came out of the tunnel and I didn’t have my arms raised above my head, yelling. Even in the midst of irrelevancy and a winless season, when the team came out of the tunnel I still felt like a 6 year old on Christmas morning. This is because I owe the Huskies something. No matter how bad my week has been the Dawgs are there in the fall. And no matter how awful the team has played, at least they’re there to give me time to spend with my family, some excitement and memories that I hope to share with my own kids someday. They’re there to give me an escape.

So this blog will be here to talk about those escapes. To talk about how the Mariners could plausibly make a World Series run or how the Huskies could be back sooner than any of us had dreamed. We hope you enjoy it, I know I will.

(Feel free to comment on any of the posts!)

-Andrew