There is no worse feeling than experiencing a loss.
You put time and energy into something, only to see it go away, slip into a thick fog where you could spend lifetimes wandering without finding answers.
We find ourselves back in that uncertain place.
There is one loss in my career that stands out among all others, one I will never forget.
It was Halloween night in 2015, brisk and cold. Minnesota’s TCF Bank stadium seemed to hover in the night like a glowing phantom.
We were playing our longest-standing rival, Michigan, who happened to be ranked 15th in the country. We were neck and neck until the end of the game when we found ourselves down by three points with 24 seconds to play. From our 23-yard line, our quarterback, Mitch Leidner, threw me a pass down the right sideline. The ball seemed to be in the air for a whole minute. The crowd was ghostly silent.
The ball approached in slow motion.
I caught it.
I looked to my right at the referee running toward me, shooting his hands up in the gesture of touchdown.
The crowd erupted. My bones shook. My teammates rushed down the field as if we had just won a war to save our nation.
Then came the review. It so happened that my knee was touching the six-inch line before the ball crossed the end-zone.
No problem. We had four possessions to go six inches and win. We ran a trick play that knocked off sixteen seconds. It failed.
Time was running out.
With only three seconds remaining we ran a wedge, known also as a QB sneak.
We got stonewalled.
Time ran out.
We lost.
Michigan held the Little Brown Jug, the trophy awarded to the winner, while we sat stunned on our sideline.
I couldn’t believe it. I had just felt the highest form of euphoria in my life, and a moment later the deepest loss in sports I’d ever felt.
I didn’t sleep that night. I was trying to find an answer, something to bring relief but there was none to find. I had come up six inches short and we had lost.
It was those six inches that would teach me more than any coach or mentor could have. It reminded me that there is room to improve. No matter how small something may seem, every inch adds up to make big differences in life. Small thoughts become big actions, inches become yards, losses to victories.
That is how I, and our team, approached it going into my senior year.
We worked harder. We used that deep feeling of loss to propel us and to become a tighter unit. And it was that same year we went to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, CA, and played Washington State.
Out of 32 polls, we were never favoured to win. They had given us a zero percent chance.
We proved them wrong, and winning that game brought us to our first nine-win season in 13 years and holding that trophy was a reminder of how far we had dug and how much work was required to feel that satisfaction of victory.
In a way, it’s easier to accept loss in sports. There are rules on how to win and how to lose. If you score more points than your opponent, you go home happy, if you don’t, you go home sad.
But in real life, there are no rules. We don’t get reasons why, and clarity seems never to solidify.
I have recently lost someone close to my heart, and I find myself feeling how I did that night after the Michigan game, wondering what I could have done differently, how I could have prevented the outcome from unfolding this way. Trying to come to terms with how a small occurrence can lead to a large loss.
The fact remains that it is lost, and there is nothing I can do now to fix that. The game moves forward, life does the same, and to spend energy on trying to rearrange the past is like running in a mouse’s wheel trying to reach the other side of the cage.
As difficult as it is, I am fighting the urge to be angry. I think anger is the instinctual emotion when there are things that frustrate us, that we cannot understand.
Instead, I am responding to it like I did after that game, letting go of the idea that I could have saved us from the loss. I am creating habits that will help me win, walking the steps necessary to prevent similar outcomes.
It’s ironic that last year I played a song on CJOB radio, live at their studio in Polo Park. The song is called “Lost” and states that sometimes we have to say goodbye to say hello.
At the time I wrote the song, I was shedding a lot of old ideas and false beliefs that I had accumulated over time. I had to say goodbye to those things in order to make room for new ideas to come through.
Now I find myself facing an entirely new feeling of loss, but those words still hold true. It is an odd feeling, hearing advice from myself given from the past.
We are all bodies full of loss, on every scale. But it’s those losses that push us toward critical understandings.
They are the realizations that pain is necessary in feeling joy, heartbreak in knowing love, and loss in earning victory.
