Sometimes I get frustrated with my future and the rate it will get here.
The kind that sits in your chest on a Monday afternoon when you realize another week has passed and the version of your life you keep picturing still has not shown up. The apartment is not here. The recovery is not quite the there. The relationship, the city, the sense that things are finally lining up—none of it is arriving on the schedule you invented for it when you thought time was something you could negotiate with.
So I do what a lot of us do when the personal timeline feels stalled: I disappear into Boston sports.
It used to be the Red Sox. For months this year I lived inside the delusion that they were this close. That one more streak, one more midseason acquisition, one more month would finally deliver the thing I needed from them. I treated this 87-win season like a moral victory and last season’s early playoff exit like a personal betrayal I had somehow earned. That particular brand of hope is exhausting. It requires you to keep rewriting the story every game.
Lately that same energy has migrated, almost without my permission, to the Patriots.
Everyone is jumping ship on Drake Maye.
I see it everywhere. After the 35-6 loss in Jacksonville, the takes arrived: He is broken. The honeymoon is over. Last year’s Super Bowl run was a fluke. The confidence is gone. Bring in someone else. Trade him. Sit him. The usual New England speed-run from “franchise quarterback” to “we’ve seen this movie before.”
I refuse.
I watched the same game everyone else watched. I saw the interceptions, the fumbles, the way he stood on the sideline with his hands on his pads looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. I know the numbers this season are ugly. I know A.J. Brown is hurt and the offensive line is banged up and Buffalo is next. I know last year’s version of him—the one who completed 72 percent of his passes and finished second in MVP voting—feels very far away right now.
None of that changes the fact that I am not getting off the boat.
This is not sophisticated analysis. This is not a film-study argument about footwork or processing speed. This is just the stubborn part of me that has already invested too much to leave (similar to other parts of my life that I refuse to leave). The same part that used to convince itself the Red Sox were one bounce away. The part that treats sports as a place where loyalty is still allowed to be irrational.
The crying blotches on my face point to my frustrations.
They show up at strange times. After a bad loss, yes, but also on ordinary nights when the future I keep waiting for still has not materialized. Sports is supposed to be the escape hatch, the thing that lets you feel something clean and simple for three hours. Instead it has started to feel like another version of the same problem: something you believed in is taking longer than you thought it would, and the people around you are already writing the obituary.
My heart points toward my unwillingness to let go.
I do not know if Drake Maye is going to be the guy. I do not know if this season is a slump or a reveal. I do not know if the Patriots are building something durable or just living off last year’s fumes. I only know that I am not ready to treat him the way so many people treated the last few quarterbacks who came through here. I am not ready to perform the public ritual of disappointment on schedule.
Maybe that is just another delusion. The Red Sox kind. The kind that keeps you coming back even when the evidence is mixed and the wait is longer than advertised.
But right now, with the future still arriving too slowly and the scoreboard in Jacksonville still ugly, that delusion is the only thing that feels like mine. I am staying. Not because I have a clever argument. Because walking away would feel like giving up on more than a quarterback.
