Thrill of sports captivates us at young age — and keeps us coming back

We touch on this theme a little bit in the WhackBack section elsewhere on this page: just how fanatical fans can really be, especially at the polar extreme of splendid success and feeble failure. It’s a question I’ve never been able to quite crack in 35 years as a professional sportswriter (and 51 years a sports fan).

But I try. Unabated, I try.

Sure, we all laugh at the old Jerry Seinfeld bit about sports mostly coming down to rooting for laundry. Still, if you’ve ever seen Jerry at Citi Field living and dying with his favorite baseball team, you know he doesn’t really mean that even a little bit, even if he happens to have a proclivity for orange and blue.

The fact is, we all have our origin story as sports fans. We all have that moment that separates the before and the after — the “before” being that last blissful moment when you don’t care about who wins or who loses, who wins the MVP, who should be the manager, who should be the captain, how soon should the coach be fired …

And the “after,” when all of these things are the most meaningful things in the world to us. It usually happens at an early and an innocent age, so none of these new compulsions get in the way of anything more important than dedicating more hours of free time to sports than to video games.

I’m sure you have a story like this one: My father, out sick from work, nevertheless feeling strong enough to meet me at the bus stop in the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1973, all so he could inform me that the Mets had just beaten the Reds for the National League pennant.

I had little idea what a “pennant” was in that context — I knew they were things that looked like flags that dad had hung on the walls in a hopeful effort to let osmosis do its magic and transform me into a sports fan. But why would I care if the Mets had won one?

It made my father very happy, so there was that. I got home and saw the ballplayers celebrate, so there was that. And suddenly in that moment, I had a thousand questions for my father. Years later, he’d joke that he was the first guy I ever interrogated, Wallace-style, when I was all of 6 years old.

But whatever he said to me, I was hooked. I mean: locked in and locked down. From that moment on — right until 18 seconds ago, when I wrote that story down — sports has been a part of me. Every day. Every hour. I can say it’s my job, too, and I have to feel that way, but people who know me know different. If I was a sushi chef or a landscaper or a lawyer, I’d be the same way about sports. I just would.

When sports gets you, it hooks you.

Ballgames matter just a little more than they should. We joked with a few Giants fans and a Yankees fan too there in the WhackBacks. But Mets fans know what we’re talking about, especially this weekend. Jets fans know, you’d better believe it, as they wait out the marathon bridge from last Thursday’s Patriots game to Sunday’s Broncos game. Knicks fans? Rangers fans? It’s been a deathly wait since last spring when the playoffs ended about a round earlier than either of them wanted, and expected.

And they’ll be back.

Because that’s what we do. We come back. We always come back. We complain and we snap and we write angry screeds and vent to talk radio hosts. Those in our lives who don’t see sports the way we do shake their heads in mystified wonder sometimes — see Hursey-Vaccaro, Leigh — and they tolerate us because they know that it matters to us, even if it couldn’t matter less to them.

We laugh at these attention-starved folks who sometimes “sell” their fandoms. If you know, you know. If you’re a sports fan you can swear off a team on the last day of September, maybe even lose interest for a time. But something will draw your attention. Something will bring you back.

Maybe it would be easier if we really could shut the faucet off for good. Some really do. But most of us, even just the worst of times, are forever living the Michael Corleone Theorem.

Just when we think we’re out …

They pull me back in.

Count me as forever grateful that they do.

Vac’s Whacks

The bandwagon is idling in the MetLife parking lot. A Jets win Sunday against the Broncos will make the elbow room a little dicey the next two weeks.

Dwight Gooden has gone back to college — the University of Maryland, to watch his son, Dylan, a redshirt freshman linebacker for the Terrapins. “College football is great,” Doc said. “I love the atmosphere. I sign a few autographs, take some photos. Mostly I’m just a normal fan watching his son.”

Joe Posnanski’s books are as reliably excellent as the Patriots used to be, though you know that already. So you already will also know that you’ll enjoy “Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments.”

The idea that baseball stadiums aren’t required to have some sort of roof as part of the bidding process feels dumber and dumber every year.

Whack Back at Vac

Marc Aaronin: Maybe the reason why the Giants have lost so much over the past 13 years is that we spend too much time blaming the officials and not enough time blaming the actual team. Dress a healthy kicker. Catch a clutch fourth-quarter ball. Keep drives going. When you’re a bad team, you don’t those things, and since 2012, the Giants have been exactly that — a bad team.

Vac: You tell me if there’s even one syllable of that which is arguable.

Kevin Bryant: The Giants had the wrong number 26 in the backfield. They need the one they let go.

Vac: Hard to argue with that one, either.

@MikeCordaro1: The problem with the Yankees is we’ve read this script too many times over the last 15 years. I was talking to a Yankee fan on the golf course today and he said, “yeah, but” when I reminded him we could clinch that night.

@MikeVacc: Sigh. Wasn’t it about 10 minutes ago that everyone was happy around here?

Michael Lynch: Mike, hats off to Shohei Ohtani on the 50/50 club, but if anyone had mentioned to Willie Mays that people were counting, Shohei would have been the second member to that club. Just saying.

Vac: And maybe third, if The Mick had been so inclined in his youth.