In my senior year of high school, my football team went 1-7. We really were not very good.

There was a combination of tough losses and key injuries, sure. Those are excuses I remember well. And in the locker room before the final game, our head coach said that for most of us it would be the last time we ever put pads on.

We lost, 30-7, to our rivals on a snowy Saturday afternoon in November. And it was the last time I ever wore pads.

Since then I’ve been pestered by the question of why sports still stay so vital to me, maybe more now than ever, even as they grow more unattainable in a physical sense, as my connection to them grows wider by the striding of time and opportunity. I wonder why I remain drawn to the stadium lights and why I am yet romanced by being witness to something so futile and unnecessary. My best answer is that I have no answer.

I’m not sure when my passion for sportswriting began, just as I’m not sure when it will end. But in four years at Syracuse my immersion into sports’ other world, the journalistic side, has come swiftly and without warning, and in some ways I am still catching up.

I’ve never taken a journalism course in my life. I’ve learned everything from my peers and my predecessors, and that makes me either unprepared or untainted, or maybe somewhere in between. I suppose I’ve done alright so far.

I was raised in a small town in western Massachusetts slapped in the tranquil mold of Anyplace, U.S.A., humming along to Little League fields and Friday night lights, each their own episode in orchestrated grandeur, each molding youths to the centricity of sports in unreasonable and unforgettable ways. There, a grip on life doesn’t stray far from knowing the grip on a curveball.

It is not something idealized, just a manifestation of some clean air and aesthetics, of wide-open spaces, largely left untainted by the processes and plastics of commercialized athletics in metropolitans or camp sites. A town with no FieldTurf or fences.

And so I was raised in the values of summer days lost to Whiffle ball and pick-up basketball. I was raised by the percussive beat of a tennis ball against my garage door.

These are what define me perhaps more than anything else, which is why I’ve always been charmed by the grunt and struggle of athletics; why I cannot let go of the boyishness of the games we play and the players we marvel at.

So I’d like to thank the athletes for letting me into their locker rooms and their lives; forgive me if I’ve tended to pry.

I’ve glimpsed into the profiles of a few, some more deeply than others. And there have been those – Curtis Brinkley, Taj Smith, Quentin Hillsman, Donte Greene, Justin Thomas – whom I’ve gotten to know, and whose stories, even in just skimming the surface, have shaped my curiosity in answering some of the profound and indelible questions that peck at me.

Profiling, of course, is tantalizing as it is shallow – we try hard to develop the bios of an athlete, digging into their life, focusing on one moment or one issue, ignoring millions more, tiptoeing around the ultimate and unanswerable of why we watch.

We watch for the superstars, sure, those that enchant the community with their effortlessness and their skill, and in my short time at Syracuse there have been a few -Jonny Flynn, Brinkley, Mike Williams, Mike Leveille – all whom I’ve been fortunate enough to cover in bits and pieces. Every so often they will leave me in breathless wonder, too – not in fanlike idolatry, but in humbling, awed appreciation. Because while the platforms and technologies of sports may change, the qualities of such athletes hold a certain timelessness, stirring the same applauses, prompting the same discussions, thrilling the same synapses of the imagination.

We watch for the others, too, those that amuse or confound or inspire or repulse us, all packaged by the games they play, all bearing themselves to our curiosity.

I’ve been told often that the best sports stories are never about sports. They’re about overcoming, struggling, vindicating, justifying, disappearing, faltering, getting hurt, getting healthy, getting pregnant, getting in trouble, hiding something, uncovering something, war, love, drugs, education, money, family, race, religion, ethnicity, and all the other little idiosyncrasies that make up who we are and what we do, that separate us from nobody, that connect us in the tiny ways that make us all human and make us all understand.

And because it doesn’t take a college football star to understand what it feels like to lose, or to win, or that sensation of pulling a helmet over your head or grip a bat in your hands, we are all tethered by the same elemental line.

The Daily Orange is not my life, not my career, only a stepping-stone to other things, other athletes, other places, to other locker rooms and press conferences, to other profiles and games. It is useful to remind ourselves of that burden, that we are here, in the present, that we are actual and alive, and moving on and moving forward …

But as I finish, I look back like I did leaving that locker room, with the same feelings of losing something irreplaceable. There is something to being a student journalist – an invulnerability, an innocence, a luxury. For four years it has been an honor and a privilege to scribble these notes about the needless games we play.

Zach Schonbrun was The Daily Orange sports columnist, where his columns will no longer appear. He can be reached at zschonbrun@gmail.com.

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Published on April 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm