On This Historic Day

I don't often write about soccer anymore, because I don't often watch soccer anymore; and I don't often watch soccer anymore because:

(1) The dream I once had, of becoming a widely read soccer blogger and then turning that into a career as a widely read soccer writer, is, on the modern internet, no longer really a viable path, but also:

(2) I tend to watch sports as a fan, which is to say I watch my favorite team (or, in individual sports, player) rather obsessively, which has the advantage of giving me kind of a control group/experimental group way of seeing the game/match, but has the radical disadvantage of meaning that if my team currently sucks, I watch a lot of shitty games. In soccer, my favorite team is Tottenham Hotspur, and while they do not suck, watching them obsessively for many years taught me that modern soccer teams play too many matches, and even the young studs who make up the squads on top teams accumulate so much fatigue over the course of the season that they can fall way off their best. That means that, as past seasons wore on, I found myself watching a lot of sub-par matches, until a few years back I finally asked myself, "Why am I spending my free time watching low-quality matches that I don't actually enjoy?"

But: Tottenham opened their new stadium today. The old White Hart Lane, opened in 1899, has been replaced with a new, modern, state-of-the-art White Hart Lane, and apparently Tottenham can make a fair argument to claim that it is the best soccer stadium in the world, which, as a fan, is pretty damn exciting. They played today against Crystal Palace, and I really couldn't not watch a match that begins a new era for a club I do still love (if maybe not with the same unabashed ardent fervor I used feel, having been burned a few times too many over the years). I even pulled out my Spurs scarf, despite my belief that it is mostly unlucky; and I wore it as I watched, and Spurs won 2-0, and even as I write this I wear that scarf still, and perhaps when I go to bed I will put the scarf on the pillow next to me, because true random is not only not rational, it's either borderline insane or stupid or both, but also

FUCK YEAH WE WON COME ON YOU SPURS.

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