For me, it starts and ends with competition. There is no greater feeling than competing. Life is pretty much one big competition. We compete as students in our classes and to get admitted into college, and we compete as adults to get jobs. We are always competing. Sports gives us an opportunity to compete against friends and strangers in a healthy way.

Sports help us rally around something. There is one team that every sports fan lives or dies by. It doesn’t matter what sport, or what city that team is from. Every fan has their favorite team. For me, it is the Boston Red Sox. I follow them as if they are a religion. We can live through our favorite sports teams. We can be happy when something good happens to them and sad when something bad does. These teams bring us to an alternate universe for the three hours that the game goes on. They bring us to a world where nothing else exists but the sport itself.

While there are many sports idols that proved to be bad role models (O.J. Simpson, Aaron Hernandez, 2004 Michael Vick, 2001 Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez, etc.), there are many sports players who can be our childhood heroes. We look up to these athletes and they help mold us into better people by showing us the right way to act on and off the playing field. Nobody exemplifies this more than Tom Brady. Maybe I’m biased, but doesn’t Tom Brady do it all? All-Star on the field with an All-Star wife and family off the field. He’s got it all. He’s never been caught getting in trouble, and he’s never disrespectful on the field.

There are so many reasons to love sports, both in playing and watching. I know that there will never be a day when I stop watching sports. For all of us however, there will come a day where we can no longer play organized sports ourselves (“We’re all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children’s game, we just don’t… don’t know when that’s gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we’re all told.” -Moneyball). So, as I enter 2014, my final year of playing baseball, a sport I’ve been playing since I was five years old, I’m going to cherish all of the reasons sports are the greatest invention that the world has ever seen.