When the Team Moves or Folds

The team is leaving. Or it is already gone.

Relocated to another city. Folded. Dissolved into another program. The thing you organized your attention around, that connected you to a community of people who shared the investment, that held memories and seasons and formative moments — it is no longer there in the form it was.

This is a specific and underacknowledged grief. The loss of a team is not a major life loss in the category of bereavement. It is also genuinely something, and the people who dismiss it don’t understand what the team was actually providing.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation. Paul’s contentment is not indifference to loss. He is describing a settled relationship with circumstances that doesn’t require the circumstances to be favorable. The team’s departure is a real loss. Contentment is not the suppression of that. It is the capacity to be in the loss without being defined or destroyed by it.

The team always belonged to something other than the fan. The fan’s relationship with the team was always contingent on decisions made by people in an industry that is not primarily organized around the fan’s attachment. The move or the folding reveals this — uncomfortably, but accurately.

What remains after the team is gone is what was actually yours: the memories, the people you watched with, the specific moments that the games created. Those belong to you in a way the franchise never did. The team leaving cannot take those. The grief is real. So is what it left behind.

The distinction is the useful one. The team was often holding something that can be held differently.