Within a few months, I suffered as my favored teams lost, each time beyond the scheduled end of the tournament
This has nothing to do with retirement, or with life wellbeing. It has to do with a personal strong feeling of emotion – you know how it is when you give huge emotional support to a sports team. And when you lose, it can hurt. Not if you were soundly beaten, of course, or if your team played badly, or got eliminated early in the tournament.
No, what hurts is when your team manages to get through the preliminary rounds, and reaches the final, and plays superbly, and you justifiably have every hope of winning, and then the game is tied at the end of regular time, and you go into extra innings (in baseball) or overtime (in ice hockey). Because then it’s essentially a toss-up: either team can win, and you might just as well toss a coin to see which one wins.
And in my case, three of my teams (the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2025 baseball World Series), and Team Canada (in the February 2026 Olympic Games, men’s and women’s ice hockey) all suffered the same fate.
OK, the Canadian women weren’t expected to win. They had already been hammered 5-0 by the US women in the preliminary fixtures. But they reached the final, against the US, and the score in the final was tied 1-1 at the end of regular time (with Canada leading until two minutes from the end). Into sudden death overtime (meaning the game ends as soon as one team scores a goal), playing with a goalie and only 3 other players instead of the regular 5 on each team, so everything is wide open and the slightest error or piece of unfortunate luck gives your opponent an advantage – and the game ends abruptly. As it did here, with the US the winners.
I thought: oh gosh, doesn’t this feel like the 2025 World Series last November? After a magnificent regular season, the Jays then went through the playoffs and reached the World Series, and played superbly against the LA Dodgers, and the best-of-7 series was tied with 3 wins apiece as the teams came to Toronto for the final game.
The Jays took the lead. Then the Dodgers came back. After 8 innings the Jays still led, 4-3. The tension was enormous! Let’s just get the final 3 outs and we’ve won! And then in the 9th, the Dodgers got a home run to tie it at 4-4. The Jays came to the plate for their turn at bat … and an amazing catch by the Dodgers prevented the Jays from winning it all in the regulation 9 innings. It was already a great, heart-stopping game.
Extra innings: one set of at-bats for each team, in each inning. Talk about hearts pounding! The 10th inning: neither team scored. Hearts pounding even harder than before, if that was possible! The 11th inning: the Dodgers batted first, and scored a run, taking the lead for the first time in the game. Up came the Jays for their turn. Could we come back? Yes, we could! We got a runner to first base, with only one man out. Let’s do it! And we hit into a double play, and just like that, in a couple of seconds, from the anticipation of a Jays win, the Dodgers got the 2nd and 3rd outs on the same play and the game was over and the World Series was over.
There’s only one winner. It doesn’t matter how well you played, or how close you came: you didn’t win. You lost. My wife suggested that we were non-winners rather than losers. Yes, it felt like that in a way: enormously proud of what the Jays did – so very, very close to winning, perhaps even (despite losing) justifying a downtown parade that would certainly have been held if we had won. Crushed (“gutted!”) in the immediate aftermath … but hearts proudly aglow as time passed.
But then … to experience the same sort of thing again at the Olympics? This was the 6th time the US and Canada met in the men’s hockey final. Everyone I’ve talked to, or heard in commentary, says it was perhaps the best hockey they have ever seen. And there it was at the end of the regulation 3 periods: the score tied 1-1. Just like the women’s final, three days earlier. I’d say unbelievable tension, unbearable tension, though obviously it was believable and bearable – but definitely HUGE! Into sudden death overtime … and sudden was indeed the word, less than 2 minutes – the US scored and won.
Suddenly, it was all over. And the heartbreak began again.
Yes, we’ll all get over it. Again. But it would have been such a thrill to have won!
And “wait till next time” will be four long years before the next Winter Olympics. Oh well, we’ll have the Jays again pretty soon … springtime is approaching …
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Let’s end on a high note. I’m going to attach these two logos at the end of all my blog posts, from now on. Next time I’ll explain why.
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I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are being discussed here. Where relevant I draw on material from three sources: The Retirement Plan Solution (co-authored with Bob Collie and Matt Smith, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), my foreword to Someday Rich (by Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith, also published by Wiley, 2012), and my occasional column The Art of Investment in the FT Money supplement of The Financial Times, published in the UK. I am grateful to the other authors and to The Financial Times for permission to use the material here.