Which sports moments will you remember from the year 2015?
Fans of the Patriots, Warriors, Blackhawks and — of course — Royals will all have their commemorative championship T-shirts to remind them how great of a year it was.
Meanwhile, fans of the Sea-hawks, Cavaliers, Lightning and — to the merriment of the entire Kansas City area — Mets will simply remember the heartbreak sports can bring.
But after a few decades, even the more die-hard Royals fans may recall Salvador Perez catching that last pitch of the season when in reality it was Drew Butera. As time passes, details get fuzzy.
It’s understandable that a memory — one that was made by watching a TV screen — can get distorted and altered.
So, I’m asking you which sports moments will you really remember from the year 2015? I’m talking about the no-doubt-about-it memories that stick with you for the rest of your life.
Seriously, reel back the highlights of your sports consciousness. Let’s try 1996 considering those memories will turn 20 soon.
Quick, who did the Nebraska Cornhuskers beat in the college football national championship? (Thankfully I was just 3 so I can’t recall the throttling my Florida Gators suffered in that title game.)
Who was inducted in the MLB Hall of Fame? (Trick question; literally not one player garnered enough votes to enter the Hall that year.)
Frankly, after a couple decades or so, you realize that the world of sports doesn’t matter to you as much as it did — or at least the world of sports that lives outside your personal timeline.
The memories that remain most clear in my life are those that will never earn a spot in the record books. They’ll never become highlights on SportsCenter. They may not even be the ones that end with trophies and awards.
Instead, I remember wrapping up a 1-20 season with the Land O’ Lakes Dodgers in Little League that was followed by a pizza party at — ironically — Winner’s Bar and Grill. There’s no logical reason I should still have a 12-year-old memory of that day. We were a bunch of losers celebrating the fact we weren’t complete losers because we did in fact win one game that season.
But I don’t think I’ll ever forget the best coach I ever had or one of the best friends I ever made, who eventually became my roommate in college.
So I ask again: What will you remember from 2015?
Will it be the time you wore your Iola Mustangs football uniform for the last time on that cold night in Girard?
Maybe you’ll recall how nervous you were before running in that state cross country meet and how only your teammates could calm you down.
Or, if you’re like my dad, you’ll recall that day in 1960 when you rocked a ball over the outfield fence for your first ever home run — only to find out after you circled the basepath that the ball curved foul at the last second.
Think about that. My 65-year-old father still has a vivid memory of hitting a foul ball when he was 10.
He was a Chicago cop, a veteran of both Vietnam and the first Gulf War and a father of five. But he’ll carry the memory of that foul ball until the day he dies.
Sports can mean so much or so little to us. In the moment, it’s hard to determine which one it will be. But rest assured that the memories that mean the most to you, and only you, will somehow stick even after a lifetime of seemingly more noteworthy events.
So goodbye 2015. We’ve got a lot of memories to make in 2016.
Remembering 2015: Which memories in sports will stick?
