Farewell: a very belated 2022 season recap

Author’s Note: I finished writing this piece on the 25th of January and finished editing it on the 1st of February. It still feels overly self-indulgent, but at least one person in the last 2 months asked me about my 2023 plans and this answers that question so I’m going for it before the season starts and it is no longer relevant. Once again I want to reiterate how grateful I am for Luke for letting me explore podcasting, long-form journalism, and data-driven sports writing. I still give a hoot!

Sometime immediately after the final whistle of Union Omaha’s historic win against Minnesota United in the Open Cup my mother-in-law died for the first time. They managed to successfully revive her, but not before they’d told my wife she was dead. What followed was one of the worst nights of my life, as I dozed fitfully between updates from the hospital. Around 5:30a in the morning, after several more resuscitations, my mother in law died. My wife and I were stuck in our house with COVID at the time.

I had a complicated relationship with my mother-in-law, but soccer was something we bonded over. She was immuno-comprised and in physical decline and never made it to a Union Omaha game. The local team was not what we bonded over. But this isn’t a story about my mother-in-law and me, it’s about me and Union Omaha.

In the days after the game I managed to do an episode of Who Gives a Hoot? and it was a blessed escape from the pain that filled my heart and my house. But that was the last Union Omaha thing I had the heart and spirit to participate in. 

I gave up my tickets to the Open Cup game against KC because it was the same day as my mother-in-law’s funeral. By the time I got home from all the family activities, I’d watched us give up two goals as I followed along on ESPN+ on my phone. As the next four goals went in I spent the rest of the game joking about sitting through my second funeral of the day. 

As the season went on, I struggled to remain connected to the team in the way I had been before. I spent a lot of time asking myself why and during that reflection I came up with two distinct answers. 

One, I’d been carrying around a lot of anger and resentment toward the team for the way I was treated at the start of the pandemic and around the start of the inaugural season. I’d wanted soccer in Omaha for so long that nothing, literally nothing, was going to stop me from being a part of it as much as I could. Accordingly, I kept myself pretty close to a number of people who hurt me deeply and prevented me from achieving something I’d dreamt about for years. I came to realize as long as I was deep inside the ecosystem the fans have created around this team, I was never going to heal those wounds. I needed more distance in my life. I watched two the biggest games in club history from my couch and missing out on the camaraderie of the Cup run inserted some distance. The process of disentangling had started inadvertently but I made a choice to continue it and let myself heal. 

Two, sports are really unfair. This should not be news. But I found it very difficult in the face of a life event that felt very unfair, the passing of my mother-in-law, to be deeply emotionally invested in a team whose fate was in the hands of League One referees. This was no shower realization, this I found out the hard way. Do you remember the night of September 14th? It was a Wednesday night and the Owls were playing the Kickers; a midweek, top of the table clash at Werner Park. Dozens (hundreds?) of folks turned out expecting to watch UO reclaim its rightful place at the top of the table. 

I was so optimistic. The funk of the summer was wearing off, and I was ready to fully invest in this team again. Instead, we watched the referees hand a 90+5 penalty to the opposing team. To me this felt deeply unfair and I felt helpless. Walking to the car that night, I realized that the feelings I was consumed with were an echo, a faint one, but an echo of how I felt at the end of May when my mother-in-law passed.  I finally accepted that I needed to be less emotionally invested in Union Omaha. 

Now, I picked a good time to bail emotionally because it’s been a rough ride for UO fans since then. We went draw, loss, draw, draw, loss, playoff loss. For me I was so relieved the season was over. I started to formulate this piece in my head as a way to process my thoughts on the season and my involvement in it.

As I did this other things happened in the world. The World Cup reignited my love of soccer. Jay left the team. Joy appeared in other places in my life. And I healed. I found myself starting to think it was a good thing I got laid off because I got to spend such incredible time with my family in a way that never would have been allowed otherwise. Found myself grateful for all the things that brought me to the place I am right now. We still miss my mother-in-law, we are still processing that trauma. I especially missed her in the build up to the France-England game in the World Cup. She would have been so fired up for that game. In short, the world went on and I realized I needed to put a period at the end of the sentence here.

I am always going to root for this team. And likely they will be the team I follow most closely in the world. But the reality is, I am not in a place to offer any unique insight to the Who Gives a Hoot? media empire. I appreciate the forum that Luke et al have given me here to share my voice and to be an outlet for my passions around this team. Maybe there will be something that compels me to do something here in the future, but it seems unlikely. If you’ve read or listened to my self-indulgent dreck in the past, thank you, it meant everything to me. And if you’ve made it this far in this piece, thanks for listening to me again. Viva Buhos!