Silly Game?

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As you can probably imagine, we had a difficult time deciding whether or not to write an article dealing with the tragic events of one year ago. After all, this is a sports site, not news or politics. We play fantasy sports for fun, and maybe in order to leave the rest of the world and its serious issues behind for a little while. Besides, so much has already been said and written about September 11, 2001 that there isn’t much that we could add. And yet, in the end we felt that we couldn’t let this day pass without a few very personal words, inadequate as they may be.

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about an email sent to me just after the attacks. At the time, I was working in Washington, DC, not all that far from the Pentagon, and countless friends wrote to ask how I was doing, just as I was trying to contact people in New York. Amid all the chaos, fear, anger and confusion, these brief notes made a huge difference.

One of these messages, sent by a good friend with whom I was playing in a fantasy league, read simply “Hope you’re ok. This whole fantasy thing seems pretty silly now, doesn’t it.”

The writer of that note was right, of course. In the face of such a catastrophe – or even any of the other tragedies of a lesser scale that occur every day – any game we play seems meaningless. Yet there’s another way of looking at it.

When we play fantasy games, especially over the internet, we don’t care about the ethnic background or religion of the other people in the league. The only time we care about where in the world they live is when time zones affect lineup decisions. We put a lot of emotion into our leagues, but hate isn’t one of them. And every once in a while, we make a new friend or two.

Maybe, compared with some of the other things that go on in this world, these games aren’t so silly after all.

 
The thoughts of all of us at the Cafe are with the victims of the September 11 attacks and their families.