In Defector's 2025 annual report, our business guy Jasper Wang wrote, "When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 33 five years later, like clockwork. While we’ve frequently hired early-career writers in their twenties, our overall average age continues to inch upward, as everyone progresses interminably towards unc status." I laughed when I read this, because it's funny and true, and also because in the year and a half since I joined Defector at 28, I'd felt the long arc of my universe start it's inevitable bend towards uncdom.
There's the fact that in August, I hurt my back for the first time. In the months that have passed since I wrote about it, I've learned just how right one of the commenters was when they pointed out that nobody's ever said, I used to have back pain. But as I wrote then, I'd also never particularly enjoyed being young. Call it PTSD from skipping fifth grade, but I've long felt that being the youngest person in the room comes with too many expectations and none of the benefits of experience. There's something freeing about familiarity, a soothingness in routine.
I was reminded of this recently when I started falling asleep in the middle of a basketball game. I think the Wizards were playing, though I can't say with any real certainty. I'd turned the game on as background noise to scroll my phone to, a habit formed during the 2025 NBA Finals when I'd discovered how pleasant watching sports could be without the constant commentary of my dad and two brothers. Now, as the sun started to set in New York at 4:00 p.m., I turned to basketball to kill time before I went to bed. I remember texting a friend, "I'm now recognizing basketball as a mechanism to get through the winter."
Up until that Wizards game, I'd been lucky enough to catch games that featured at least one player I was familiar with. This was enough for me to remain more or less locked in i.e. glancing up from Township, the phone game I'm addicted to, every couple of minutes until the fourth quarter. On this particular evening when the Wizards were playing (maybe it was the Pelicans?), I settled on the couch with my cat and my phone for another night of the same. The interchangeable voices of the announcers droned on about turnovers and field goals. And then I woke up, jarred awake by the game's end segueing into an episode of Bel-Air. The same happened the next night, and the next. Unless I had coffee too late in the day or the Knicks were playing, I'd inevitably start dozing off around halftime. As it kept happening, I started to look forward to the moment I told myself I was just resting my eyes, just for a second.
It's a phrase—I'm just resting my eyes—that I associate with my father. Maybe that's why I've felt closer to him and his kind (sports fans) as I've joined them in an activity that seems just as central to watching sports as yelling at them. If there were tiers of unc activities, falling asleep in front of a game is, to me, at the top of the pyramid. Maybe because it's one that I've seen my father and brothers and uncles participate in as long as I've been alive.
As a connoisseur of pre-gaming sleep, a.k.a. falling asleep on the couch before finally just going to bed, I thought I'd cracked the code with Frasier marathons or endless loops of Trixie and Katya videos. But there's something special about falling asleep during a game; because no two games are exactly alike, there's no knowing what I'll fall asleep or wake up to. But perhaps even more important than that is the sense of fellowship; I suspect the safest bet I could place during any given game is on the fact that someone out there is in the exact same position I am, prone on their couch with a pet sleeping nearby, resting their eyes for just a second. There are some aspects to sports fandom that are reserved for just the hardcore fans, the fans like my brothers and father who have been rooting for the Chicago Bears for their whole lives. But its brought me not a small amount of joy to discover the places where people like me, who hesitate to even identify as sports fans, can feel like a part of something bigger than themselves. Maybe this time next year, I'll even be yelling at the refs.
