Newsletter 88: Those Very Special Sports Seasons

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from January 2018, written right before Georgia lost to Alabama in the National Championship Game. The timing seemed right on this one, considering my Blues are now one win away from their first-ever Stanley Cup. I am not as dedicated a Blues fan as I am a Cardinals fan and Illini basketball fan, so if they win, they’d go in at №6 on this list, between the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals and the 2008–09 Arizona Cardinals. If they lose, they probably don’t crack the top 10. Them’s the breaks. Go Blues.

On Monday night, the Georgia Bulldogs will either become national champions of college football, or they will fall short to the hated Alabama Crimson Tide once more. This season, as I wrote in an SoE piece this week, has been a dream season in just about every way for Georgia fans, and no matter what happens Monday, that’s something that doesn’t come along often. In that piece, I tried to nail down recent examples of Dream Seasons — in which every possible thing you could want to happen happens, when all the years of watching your team fall just short and lose pay off for you with everything falling just perfect start to finish — in that piece, and I couldn’t come up with many. A few recent examples: