Unfortunately, these reasons don’t quite justify the more pathological practitioners of fandom. By which I mean hard cases like me, who spend decades rooting for teams that almost invariably stomp our hearts. To understand this species of devotion requires the invocation of Omar Little, the mystical Robin Hood figure of “The Wire.” As he puts it, “A man’s gotta have a code.”

To my ilk, this code amounts to unwavering loyalty. You stick with your team, no matter how lousy and undeserving it becomes. You don’t chase winners. This is why Spike Lee, patron saint of Brooklyn, will never root for the newly minted Brooklyn Nets. He’s a Knicks guy for life — even if the idiots in the front office let Jeremy Lin get away. Am I suggesting that Spike and I are morally superior to fans who switch allegiances or simply take pleasure in games for their own sake? No, though we certainly enjoy feeling this way. Given the modern sports landscape, in which contract money trumps player loyalty, we lifers are basically rooting for laundry.

But fandom is fundamentally a spiritual arrangement. It is a form of surrender, an agreement to live in a state of powerlessness. The only thing we control as fans is the object and ardor of our devotion. And this unilateral covenant, however absurd, constitutes a vital expression of who we really are.

This is why each new indignity hurts so much, yet fortifies our bond. The losses echo back across the years. As a weak, frightened kid growing up in the suburbs of Northern California, I rooted for the Raiders because they embodied a certain outlaw attitude I longed to evince. But when I think about my earliest fervor for the team, what returns to me is not pride at the three Super Bowls the Raiders won but a conviction that they could never beat the Pittsburgh Steelers. This feeling is a direct result of growing up in the shadow of a domineering older brother — who just happened to root for the Steelers. So I felt about the Raiders the way I felt about myself: that no matter what I achieved in the world, I would never vanquish my brother. And thus I spent the dim Decembers of my youth in a state of cosmic grievance, absorbing his taunts after another Steelers conquest. The first of these humiliations came in 1972, when the Steelers running back Franco Harris made the Immaculate Reception, plucking a deflected fourth-down pass off his shoe tops and carrying it 43 yards for the winning touchdown with five seconds left in the game.

I rooted even harder the next year.

The code had become my way of holding on to faith in the face of inevitable loss. Because not only had my team lost, but it would lose again, as all teams do, if not immediately then eventually. And this experience forms the unconscious bedrock of our identification.

After all, we live in a culture that enforces competition and deifies success. We’re relentlessly subjected to winners, when the truth is that most of us spend our entire lives losing, or feeling anyway that we’ve failed to win it all. We squander our talent, we mismanage the clock, we choke in the clutch. Our teams, in other words, enact public dramas that we experience as struggles to transcend our own private defects. They allow us to psychically offload our sense of futility.

We need look no further for evidence than to the meteoric rise of sports talk radio. Anyone who has listened to this format will tell you that nothing lights up the phone lines like a crushing defeat. And what you hear in the callers’ voices, beneath the bluster and complaint, is actually quite moving: an effort to grapple with defeat.