I have plenty of friends who are New York Mets fans. And while they by no means have a monopoly on suffering, it is a major (the major?) component of their experience. So much so that Jon Stewart could use it as a running punchline on The Daily Show. In essence: “This is horrible, year after year, and we are all going to feel a great deal of pain together this year, as we did last year, as we will next year. We are Mets fans.”

The majority of these fans are adults. Primarily grown men, with jobs and kids and houses and the deeply guarded fear, slowly morphing into knowledge, that their lifelong dream, whatever it may be, will remain just that.

True fanaticism as it applies to professional sports does not stand to reason. Multimillionaires who do not know you (nor particularly care to know you) play a…