According to religious fanatic Harold Camping and Family Radio, the world will come to an end Saturday. As with most religious propaganda, I personally don’t buy it. But as a sports fan, if Saturday is, in the words of R.E.M., the end of the world as we know it, I’ll feel fine for the following reasons:
LeBron James will have never won an NBA Championship
Bad people don’t deserve to have good things happen to them, and James winning an NBA Championship less than a year after quitting on the Cleveland Cavaliers and then stabbing them in the back would be exactly that. If you told me the end of the world meant James would never complete the goal he’s used as an excuse for his inexcusable behavior over the past 12 months, then I’m perfectly OK with that.
Ohio State football’s own Judgment Day will never come
If the world doesn’t last past May 21, that means Aug. 12, the date in which OSU football coach Jim Tressel and school officials are supposed to meet with the NCAA Infractions Committee regarding multiple rules violations committed by the football program, will never happen.
If that day never comes, OSU can never be officially punished — the 2010 season won’t be vacated, and our last memory of the Scarlet and Gray will be a Sugar Bowl victory, not an awkward press conference in which OSU President E. Gordon Gee fires Tressel (or would it be Tressel firing Gee?).
The NFL lockout will be irrelevant
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to live in a world without professional football anyway. Would you want to live in a world in which you don’t spend 22 Sundays in a row (yes, I watch the Pro Bowl), hungover on your couch, watching grown men do irreparable damage to their brains and bodies?
I didn’t think so.
Factoring in that the end of the world would mean the last NFL game ever played was a Pittsburgh Steelers loss, I’m kind of rooting for the apocalypse.
Chicago Cubs fans will never get to experience a World Series
Is there a whinier fan base in the entire universe than Cubs’? Sure, Cleveland fans are whiny, but we deserve to whine. We haven’t witnessed one of our teams win a championship since 1964. All Chicago fans got to witness was the greatest athlete of all time bring them six NBA titles, one of the most memorable Super Bowl winners ever in the 1985 Chicago Bears and an NHL Stanley Cup less than a year ago.
So what if one of your teams sucks? Ask any Pittsburgh fan if suffering through a Pirates season is worth getting to Steelers and Penguins season, and he’ll tell you in a heartbeat that it is. Maybe if you treated Wrigley Field like a baseball stadium and not a host for social gatherings, the Cubs would have won a championship since 1908. Hearing Cubs fans lecture that poor Steve Bartman guy about what it means to be a true fan was like hearing Lindsay Lohan lecture Charlie Sheen about what it means to be sober.
Other reasons I’m OK with the world ending: I’ll never have to witness Kyrie Irving take his talents to South Beach in six years; Columbus will never have to witness the Blue Jackets taking their talents to Winnipeg; Braxton Miller will never go down as a disappointment to Buckeye fans.
