This post is something I wrote during a bout with insomnia last night. It talks about a variety of sports, but I put it in the BYU Basketball category because of its connection to Jimmer. I'm just doing a cut and paste without having edited so I apologize in advance for any typos or flow issues. I may edit later, but that pesky thing called "work" and making sure to pay the bills takes priority. That said, here goes:

As a young child I remember my family owned two televisions. They were the only way to get what we now call “screen time.” One was a large, boxy piece of furniture that sat on the floor and was probably about three and half to four feet tall. The cost of that television was more than what it would cost to buy most 70 inch screen TVs today. Not just more when adjusted for inflation. It cost more in actual dollars. But despite its size and cost, the screen was smaller than 30 inches. The other TV in our home was a small black and white in my parents’ bedroom.

My dad was a man’s man in a lot of ways. He had a phenomenal mechanical mind. But he didn’t care at all about sports. He later took an interest in sports in a successful attempt to connect with me, but that’s off topic.

The first sporting event I ever remember seeing involved that tiny black and white TV in my parents’ room. One evening I slipped into my mom and dad’s room and turned it on. I don’t recall having any idea what was on or what I thought I might watch. By pure coincidence I happened to turn the channel to a World Series baseball game in New York. I saw a crowd of people cheering like crazy. It was a larger group of people in one place than I had ever seen in my life. As luck would have it, I tuned in not long before Reggie Jackson hit his third home run of the game. The crowd went nuts and I was hooked. The announcers were talking about Reggie’s historic game. Prior to that game, Babe Ruth was the only player to ever hit three home runs in a World Series game. Reggie stood alone with the Babe for another 34 years. Albert Pujols did it in 2011 and Pablo Sandoval followed in 2012.

After that night, I wanted to find out all I could about baseball. Over the next few years I checked books out of my elementary school library and read a few dozen biographies of players like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Duke Snyder, and Phil Rizzuto. My biography reading and my sports interest broadened to other sports and I read about players like Johnny Unitas and Kareem Abdul Jabaar. I didn’t care that most of these players had retired before I was born.

As I watched sports, there was a magic to what I was seeing. I regularly saw things I had never seen before. I saw plays that would be Sports Center Top 10 plays today and often I was seeing that kind of play for the first time. I also saw no hitters, triple plays, half court buzzer beaters, and Hail Mary’s. Things I hadn’t even imagined. Although I was too young to have been aware of the original “Immaculate Reception” involving the Pittsburgh Steelers and Franco Harris, I remember seeing replays in my early sports watching days. What a crazy play. Terry Bradshaw threw a pass that was batted down. Had the pass hit the ground, the game would have ended in a win for the Oakland Raiders. Franco Harris, however, did not give up on the play. Some Raiders’ defenders had already begun celebrating their victory before the ball hit the ground. Harris ran forward, caught the ball just before it hit the ground and raced to the end zone for the game winning touchdown.

Seeing great plays was like a high from a drug. I could pick just about any game, watch for a few minutes and then decide which team I wanted to win. I had favorite teams, but I could become almost as invested in some random game between two teams I had never heard of as I was in a game involving one of my favorite teams.

The year 1980 was a great year for magic memories. I remember watching Danny Ainge dribble around all five Notre Dame defenders (some more than once) to make a game winning layup that put BYU into the Elite 8. And, of course, I remember watching the Miracle Bowl. Early in the fourth quarter, my sister convinced me to turn off the game because BYU was getting destroyed. She wanted to play Monopoly. I played Monopoly with the TV off for most of the fourth quarter. Partly because I was too naïve to know that teams didn’t come back from deficits like that except in the rarest of cases, I decided to turn the TV back on to check on things right before BYU mounted its comeback. Overcoming a 20 point lead with less than four minutes remaining in the game is rare today, but it happens. Back then it was an extreme rarity. The Hail Mary from McMahon to Clay Brown left me feeling euphoric. It was so unexpected and rare that the NFL pregame shows the next Sunday even devoted coverage to it.

I have read that with some addiction the initial high is the most intense and addicts spend the rest of their time as addicts in a futile attempt to chase that original high. As I grew older and watched more sports, amazing and unimaginable plays have seemed to come with less frequency. Sure, I see plays like Donovan Mitchell going up and finishing an alley-oop dunk when it appeared that he wouldn’t even be able to get the ball because it was thrown too far off to the side. And I definitely appreciate the athleticism and the skill involved. But I’ve seen dunks like that before. With each really good play, I can almost always think to myself, “I’ve seen that before.” The enjoyment is still there. But the magic and the newness are largely gone.

I still watch games and sometimes I feel like I’m getting a dopamine hit. It may be a dopamine hit, I don’t know. I know that there have been studies done that show that men have higher testosterone levels after seeing their team win and lower testosterone levels when their team loses. And I enjoy sports even without the “drug like” effects. All that said, I don’t get the same “high” and feel the same magic I did as a kid. It’s a little like I am an addict involved in a futile effort to chase the intensity of the first high.

This is the part where Jimmer comes in. Jimmer’s senior year at BYU was more than thirty years after I sat transfixed by what I was seeing on the small black and white TV as Reggie Jackson hit his third home run of the game in the World Series. But when I watched that BYU team play, I was the little kid in my parents’ bedroom again. I was mesmerized watching something I hadn’t ever seen before. It was magic. Game after game, my jaw dropped and I experienced the euphoria of the late 70s and early 80s. I was the dog that finally caught the car. The addict that matched and even exceeded the intensity of the original high.

When people go overboard in cheering like many Jazz fans did when Jimmer played in Salt Lake a few weeks ago, they aren’t cheering that way for a guy because of a shared religion or even just because he played for their favorite college team. Many of them are cheering for the guy who brought sports magic into their lives in ways that only come around about once every four decades. That is what guys who were annoyed like Rudy Gobert and Joe Ingles don’t understand. I pity the poor souls who got hooked on sports for the first time with Jimmer. How long will they chase that feeling? And will they ever find it again?

I feel bad for Jimmer because of the seemingly over the top reaction of his fans in the various NBA cities. I know it annoys his teammates and coaches. And it probably puts the wrong kind of pressure on him in ways that make his success more difficult. I wish people would be a lot more muted going forward. All that said, it happens because Jimmer was the guy that brought the childlike wonder and magic back to sports for some of us middle aged and older folks. And that will be true regardless of what happens (or doesn’t happen) in his NBA career going forward.