In Praise of Hometown Teams
How sports help me remember where I come from.
I had hoped to send this post out in mid-June, but alas, the season is over.
You see, I’m a Cleveland fan, which makes me a Cavaliers basketball fan. Before I continue, fear not. This isn’t a post just about the Cavs, but bear with me.
For those who don’t know or care, the Cavs were the top seed in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Most of the experts picked them to at least make the Eastern Conference Finals. Some picked them to go to the Finals, which would’ve dragged their schedule into early and mid-June––when I originally hoped to send this post.
But reality had a different narrative in mind, as it almost always seem to in Cleveland. In reality, the Cavs got knocked out of the playoffs in the second round––in convincing fashion, no less.
Their dismantling by the Indiana Pacers wasn’t just a bummer because I’m a fan and Cleveland is my team, but because it brought to a swift end the six months of joy I’ve had following their historic season. (They started the year with a 15-game winning streak, only the fourth time in NBA history.)
In many ways, I enjoyed following this team more than the 2016 LeBron team that actually won the championship. There wasn’t any behind-the-scenes drama made public. The 2024 - 2025 crew seem like and, by all accounts, are legit good dudes who get along, enjoy playing together, and doing it for their adopted city. They were fun to watch and easy to cheer for.
Okay, I promised this wasn’t just about the Cavs. So I’ll get to the point.
It’s been nearly nine years since we left Cleveland. Ironically, we left just a couple months after celebrating the 2016 Cavs’ championship. (I made the video below during my peak-I-loathe-cars days and thought it was as good an opportunity as ever to show skeptics how much nicer cities are without cars––something I still, unsurprisingly, believe.)
When I left Cleveland, my connection with my hometown sports teams started to fade. Don’t get me wrong, I was glued to all of the updates and stayed up late to follow the then-Indians’ World Series run. But after that, I maintained only a passing following of my teams––teams who once had the power to control my mood. (Not saying that’s a good thing.)
Sometime last summer, when the Guardians were slapping around teams, I discovered highlight videos on YouTube. As long as I didn’t look up the score, I could start my morning watching the highlights, and depending on the stakes, relive the excitement (or as was the case more recently, disappointment) in a 12-minute rollercoaster of emotions.
I’m sure leagues and teams have been uploading highlight videos for years now. But you don’t know what you don’t know.
Through the Guardians and Cavs, I’ve rekindled a kind of cozy affection for my hometown that admittedly started to drift away once I achieved my long-time dream of moving to Europe, like a friendship that crumbles out of sight when lives inevitably change. The Browns would come back in between, appropriately grounding me during the winter months that are just as loathsome in Berlin as they are in Cleveland.
I wouldn’t have thought it at the time, but I now know that I took these teams fore granted when I lived in Cleveland. Because they were like relatives. They’re just there. You can pay attention to them (or not) whenever you want.
Now, for better or worse, they’re the best connection I have to where I’m from. And maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but watching something from Cleveland succeed, even if it is just a silly old sports team, makes me a little more proud to be from there. It reminds me to check in and see what else is going on in the city to make it more livable and special for the folks who live there, like our local metroparks’ forthcoming development of a long-neglected chunk of the riverfront. It all makes me want to be a little louder about being a Clevelander, whether I’m traipsing around Berlin or running along mountain paths in Nepal.
That’s why I was especially bummed to wake up last week, watch the Game 5 highlights between the Cavs and Pacers, and find out that the season is over. I can’t live vicariously through their success anymore. (Well, at least until next season, because I do believe, as Donavan Mitchell put it, we’ll be back.)
I’m left wishing we still had our WNBA team (though it seems like they’ll be making a return in 2028) and that our new men’s and women’s soccer teams were already playing to help supplement a summer of Cleveland Guardians baseball. I love my routine of waking up in the morning, making coffee for Melanie and me, and watching the highlights. More than anything, it’s nice to watch and read something that isn’t about how the world is spinning around the bottom of a toilet bowl.
On paper, it seems like such a frivolous thing––caring about professional sports teams, especially when you consider all of the underlying issues with each and every league that have little to do with the game itself. Not to mention when you have billionaire criminals, like the Haslams, trying to move the Browns out of downtown Cleveland to a suburb for what really reeks like a greedy vanity project.
But when it’s all said and done, I’m grateful to have these teams. Ownership and league issues aside, the teams themselves often reflect where they are. New York teams are cocky. LA teams are flashy. In Cleveland, as LeBron James famously put it, nothing is given, everything is earned.
Those are my teams. They help me remember where I’m from and I hold that close to my heart. And no matter where you end up in the world, whether you’ve moved abroad or are traveling the world, if you can’t remember where you’re from, then you truly are lost.
Coming in June – The Adventure Almanac
Starting next month, I’m launching a once-a-month series called The Adventure Almanac featuring a selection of trip ideas for those of you who have your passport ready to go, but aren’t sure of where you want to travel.
Most travelers plan their big trips 3-6 months in advance, so that’s what I’ll be focusing on. I can tell you now that June’s edition will spotlight traveling to Japan in November––both because it fits the timeframe and it’s when I’ve traveled there in the past. I could say more, but I’ll save that for June.
Besides international destinations, I’ll share the latest travel deals and ideas on domestic trips (for a North American audience) that might take a little less planning. Whatever the case may be, the emphasis will always be on off-the-beaten-path destinations and adding a bit more adventure to our lives.
This will be a series exclusive for paid subscribers. That said, I’ll leave the first one open to all subscribers so you know what you’re signing up for. And in case you’ve forgotten some of the benefits of paid subscription, one of them is the opportunity to connect with me for any and all travel advice. Plus it’s a great way to show your support if you’ve been enjoying these weekly updates and/or anything else I’ve been doing with the podcast, YouTube, or wherever you catch my work.
So consider signing up for a paid subscription. And hey! If there are other benefits that would get you to sign up that you don’t see, just let me know. I’m always open to ideas.
So long as you, ya know, they’re good ones.
What else is new…
We’re really pumping out episodes of Travel Tomorrow these days. Most recently, I chatted with Maria Pasquale about all things Rome. We also cross-posted my conversation with Yulia from the Going Places podcast. We talk about my experience as an American immigrant in Germany, how living overseas has changed my perception of life in the US, and what it’s like running 100 miles running across the Omani desert.
Right now I’m sitting on a couch at a VRBO rental in Barr, France. In less than 24 hours, I’ll be lining up for my fourth ultramarathon––the Trail des Celtes 50K. I’m excited to get out there, but a lingering groin injury from March is giving me pause. Diagnoses have ranged from a surgeon telling me it’s definitely a hernia after a whopping two seconds of observation and a sports physio suspecting that I have adductor tendinopathy.
Whatever’s going on down there, it doesn’t particularly matter at the moment. I’m running this thing and meeting Melanie when she crosses the finish line herself to complete her first ultramarathon.
More soon in a future newsletter in praise of, you guessed it, ultramarathons.