On Saturday afternoon, wearing a red polyester shirt marked with the name of a man who is now in prison, I spent three hours yelling and screaming at a television at the Taco Mac on Peachtree Street in an attempt to encourage strangers in black helmets 1,850 miles away to run faster and shove harder and catch better than other strangers in white helmets. This is what sports will to do you.

A lot of us were behaving this way, but we could no more give you a rational explanation for our behavior than we could fly with our Buffalo wings. The Falcons were in the playoffs. The team from our city was one of the best in America at putting an odd-shaped leather missile across a line of white chalk, and this filled us with pride. And so we cried the name of Jerious.

Ask me why I watch sports and I can’t tell you, exactly, except that I love stories, and sports give me the backstory of a soap opera with the suspense of a big-budget blockbuster in addition to plot twists far too surprising for a scriptwriter to fabricate. Plus we all want to feel like warriors every now and again, and these games are like vicarious battles.

The Falcons fought with great valor this year. They gave me more joy than I could have expected. But when the Cardinals converted on third-and-sixteen and then ran out the clock, I felt empty, just like my pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon, as if I had lost something physical and real, an object whose color and shape I could not describe.

I expect to retrieve it in about eight months.