Why I’ll choose to cherish these Illini, rather than chastise them
The toughest part of following collegiate sports is undoubtedly that you go into it knowing the guys you’re going to root like hell for will only be there for a finite, given amount of time. And, sure, that’s true of any fandom. We know these guys can’t play forever, but it’s a different animal when it comes to college teams.
We know our favorite guys will only be around for four years, max. It’s not like being a Packers fan and tuning in every week for close to two decades watching Aaron Rodgers. And that makes following college sports much more emotional for me. Just when you start falling for a guy, he’s already on his way out, off to bigger and better things.
But in some ways, it makes the time you spend pumping your fist into the air, alone in your basement, more special, too. I’ve learned to cherish my fandom for Illini athletics in ways I don’t for the professional teams I root for. And guys like Trent Frazier, Kofi Cockburn, DaMonte Williams, Alfonso Plummer, Coleman Hawkins, Andre Curbelo and if we go back to last season, Ayo Dosunmu, they have no idea what they’ve meant to me.
When COVID changed our lives (seemingly for good, right?) life became much more lonely. I still remember those few months without sports, where all we had to watch on our TVs was whatever the streaming services had for us. It got so bad we all fell for the ridiculousness that was The Tiger King, but I digress.
When sports returned en masse in the fall of 2020, us sports fans had our release back. We had our drama back. But most importantly, we had our camaraderie back. COVID had naturally and organically changed my relationship with two of my best friends. What I mean by that is we simply didn’t see each other as much, and it was really just the way of the world. It wasn’t really any of our faults.
Then … Illini basketball came back. And ZOOM was a thing. And all of a sudden, watching the game with my two best friends became a thing again. I looked forward to Illini basketball games with enthusiasm that I hadn’t felt in quite some time.
And it wasn’t so much that the team was fun to watch. That helped, yes, but it meant that I could share some quality time with my friends again. Watching games with my buddies had become keeping one eye on the big screen and one on my iPad, which allowed us to revel in the good times together, commiserate during the bad times, and everything in between.
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Illini basketball became more than fandom. It became the glue that kept the three of us together. It became a key cog in my social life, and those guys I mentioned before (Trent, Ayo, Kofi and the rest of the gang), they were part of that. One of my fondest memories during the last two seasons was Trent Frazier going off in Ann Arbor last season, not so much because it was basketball perfection, but more so that the three of us shared that night together.
And what you realize is that it’s tough to recreate those moments. If I get on Zoom with my buddies tonight, we can’t just snap our fingers and have the kind of fun the night we had when Trent went crazy on Michigan. That’s what I mean when I say Trent Frazier will never understand what he means to me. It was more about harboring my personal relationships than it was about basketball.
Last year, when the Illini lost to Loyola, my uncle who attended Loyola 40 years ago, hadn’t watched a single Loyola game before that day and couldn’t name one player on each team, started sending me smack-talking messages in the hours after the game. I snapped at him and said some things I regret today, which was unfair of me.
But what my uncle didn’t understand was everything I just explained above. Illini basketball had become something greater than just basketball. It helped maintain and sustain crucial friendships in my life. It gave the three of us guys a happy release from the stresses of everyday life, in a time when those stresses were pushed to their limits.
And to bring it back around to what I started off this essay with, when Frazier, Cockburn and Williams all announced they would return this season, I was selfishly elated, because it meant that a good part of that previous season’s magic would return, and in my head I looked forward to recreating those Zoom sessions. Even as vaccines and COVID dips made it possible to watch games together in person again, those Zoom viewings became a staple of the Illini basketball experience for all three of us. And with the return of key pieces of that COVID-year-team, I selfishly looked forward to recreating those special moments.
And Trent and Kofi delivered. This season was just as much fun as the season prior, on multiple levels. What was perhaps an unexpected development this season was how my 9-year-old son and I bonded over this team. I’ll forever remember the 2021–2022 as the first team he and I really bonded over. He watched games in prior seasons with me, but this season I started noticing that he was hanging on every possession. He started making meaningful observations about the games as he sat in those Zoom sessions with my friends. And I was no longer pumping my first in the air alone in my basement. I now had a mini-me jumping into my arms every time Plummer hit a big three-pointer.
And now that another season has ended in heart-breaking fashion, it starts to hit me that those special moments are gone for a while. And the four of us, my two best friends, my son and I, we’ll have to establish new connections with mostly a new batch of faces, with new personalities. And there’s no doubt that we’ll make those connections and we’ll have more memorable evenings with Illini basketball.
But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t hurt, losing again, before it was supposed to be over. But I’m making a pact with myself, not to remember Trent, Ayo, Kofi, DaMonte and Alfonso by their shortcomings. Instead, I’ll cherish the moments they gave me on those cold winter nights in my basement, two screens simultaneously sharing my attention, when camaradiere, once taken for granted, had returned in a big way. Those are the memories I’ll choose to hold onto tighter than anything else.
Go Illini.
