The Internet is changing the behavioral protocall for all die-hard sports fans with a modem.
Angry phone calls on sports talk radio are being replaced by angry rants on online message boards.
In-person stalking is leaving in favor of Facebook stalking March Madness greats, New Years Day heroes, and former AU tennis star Tushar Garg.
And settling for an out-of-town box score is no longer acceptable with streaming internet sending BoSox and Yanks (and maybe even other teams') games directly to your dorm-room laptop.
Those fans that used cyberspace merely for porn (for lack of a better term, we'll call this demographic "males") are now spending every waking hour distracted from a psych paper by personnel crises on their Yahoo fantasy football teams.
Where, in this inescapable life of keyboard fandom, does this leave room for playing the game, you know, with our hands and feet? Seeing ourselves fail almost as miserably as Brooks Bollinger? Feeling our knees swell almost as much as Karl Malone's, or our feet shuffling almost as slowly as Harold Baines's?
As I ask this, it's 3 a.m. on Saturday night, and I'm still typing because, in this weekend of marquee baseball, football and boxing match-ups, I can't stop reveling in D.C. United's 4-1 drubbing over the MetroStars in lowly Major League Soccer.
I could've been done this thing by midnight. I didn't have to watch an Internet highlight package four times in a row. Nor did I need to surf cyberspace looking for what other excited D.C. fans, or more importantly, disgruntled Metro fans, were saying.
And I certainly could have resisted the thread, "What will the new United States uniforms look like?" which for some reason took priority over my column and another tired episode of "Saturday Night Live."
Sadly, on many Saturdays, this is fairly routine.
Far less routine? My overweight behind actually on a soccer field.
Two years have passed since I roamed the Tenley Campus field looking for blood. Surely, laziness, depression over my horrid first touch, and the scarcity of XXL soccer shorts are all contributing factors.
But there's something bigger (not) at work here.
While I miss the game and the thrill of competition, when I think about a comeback, I tell myself there's not enough time. But really, if I cut my posts at www.soccerweirdos.com by even 20 percent, I could suit up for every team in the league.
How'd this all start? As a kid, I grew up watching sports because I wanted to play them, and I grew up playing sports because I liked watching them. This symbiosis caused sport to become an essential fiber of my high-school life.
Then, I got nut-megged as a sophomore goalkeeper, false started as a junior sprinter, and sat pineside for 20 games as a 6-foot-nothing senior power forward.
After all that frustration, I left live competition, deciding it far easier to critique others wounds than dab gauze upon my own, and became a journalism major.
Today, the Web is offering every Joe Public that chance. It's therapeutic, but it's also a trap. Because the worst player on the MetroStars' reserves is still the best player to ever wear shin guards at somebody's high school. Your college point guard, despite being passed over in the draft, still has 5,249 more Facebook friends than you. And there's no telling how many times a girl has rejected your Friday night date offer because of live baseball (i.e. Derek Jeter) Webcasts.
The chasm between grass-roots and big-time athletes is wider than ever. And the Internet fosters the obsession, worship and verbal abuse of those on the other side of the talent chasm, making your average pick-up game, somehow, insignificant.
It better stay that way. I need to find a job next year.
