On Camaraderie

June is bittersweet.

If you’re like me, the end of the hockey season is reason enough to hole up in my apartment in a fit of overwhelming sadness. But with the hot weather comes baseball and, more importantly, football.

If you’re like me, you value professional (and amateur) sports as more than pure entertainment. Supporting a team promotes loyalty and the value of being a team player. It teaches you how to lose, and how to win. It puts being supportive, dependable, and driven up as ideals. Being a fan brings with it the highs, but also the absolute lows. It brings loss and love and admiration. It brings frustration and often anger, but it also brings people together like nothing else.

And because of all of these things, June is bittersweet. Maybe your hockey season ended with the regular season, or with a Stanley Cup, but in either case with June comes the loss of that sense of camaraderie shared with the parts of the city that support your team. And it’s hard – Ottawa has, until now, been sadly lacking in the professional sports department, especially when compared with cities like New York.

But with the addition of our very own CFL team, we, as a city, have gained far more than a professional sports franchise. We’ve been given the opportunity to sit in a sold out stadium and scream our joys and tears as one body and know that we are sharing those emotions with a city. For the first time. For the second. For the one hundredth. If this isn’t the best way to become a die hard fan, then I don’t know what is. We’ll get to watch rivalries build and players invent our touchdown dance. We’ll get to watch kids put on their favourite player’s jersey and aspire to play for the Redblacks.

There is nothing like being a fan.

With the hibernation of the hockey season comes the adrenaline of the football season, and the extra bonus of a brand new franchise in Ottawa.

So, favourite this team. Support this team. Watch this team. Win with this team. Lose with this team. Love this team.

Bleed Redblacks – Valerie