91Å·ÃÀ¼¤Çé

Editor’s Note: This is Part 5 of a five-part series on what it means to be a DC sports fan in 2026. 91Å·ÃÀ¼¤Çé’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of fans — die-hards, casuals, transplants and people who barely watch — about how they follow their teams, what it costs them and what keeps them coming back. Some of what they said was about coverage. Most of it wasn’t. Read all 5 parts and learn more about how this series was reported.Ìý

Four days ago, I told you there’s never been a better time to follow a team, and that it’s never felt more like work. Both are still true. The abundance is real, and so are the noise, the costÌýand the quiet little fictions we tell about the kind of fan we are.

But sit under all of it long enough and you reach the floor this whole series was standing on the entire time.

It was never the winning — after all, D.C. sports has been an education in heartbreak for most of the last few decades: The Capitals spent years inventing new ways to lose in the spring before they finally broke through in 2018. The Nationals made an art form of the early October exit until 2019. The NFL team, under three nicknames, spent the better part of three decades wandering the wilderness.

Yet through all of it — the collapses, the rebuilds, the ownership soap operas — almost nobody left (save for the swaths of die-hard Burgundy and Gold fans who couldn’t get over the 2020 name change). Why?

The answers turned out to be the truest and most beautiful part of the whole exercise.

‘You feel them in your bones’

At the end of nearly every conversation, I asked some version of the same question — the one this whole series had been circling: What does sports give you that nothing else does?

Rich, the die-hard from Laurel you met in Part 3, put it in terms I haven’t been able to shake. The great sports moments, he told me, aren’t entertainment. They’re milestones — and they sit on the same shelf as the milestones that have nothing to do with sports at all:

“You feel them in your bones, in your very being. There are very few things in life like that: holding your child for the first time, seeing your spouse on your wedding day.”

He can name his the way you’d rattle off birthdays — Jayden Daniels’ rookie season and ; to lift the Orioles to victory in the 2014 ALDS most people outside of Baltimore have already filed away.

And they don’t fade out with the box score. 91Å·ÃÀ¼¤Çé’s own Rob Stallworth played college basketball a lifetime ago, and he’ll tell you the body keeps what the standings forget:

“That exhilaration about being an athlete — it never leaves you. Your body may get old … but that never leaves you.”

Ronnie expressed a similar sentiment on his long commute home to Upper Marlboro, saying the watching is how he copes with being well past his own competitive days. Ask him what he gets out of sports, even as a spectator, and he doesn’t reach for anything small:

“Oh man, complete satisfaction and fulfillment,” he said. “You know, my playing days are over, so it’s where I get the fulfillment from really participating in watching and learning.”Ìý

A lifelong fan, a former college player, and a man who never quite stopped being a player in his own head — and all three describe the same thing.

A great sports moment doesn’t file itself away like a fact. It settles into the body and stays.

Sometimes for a lifetime.

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You don’t feel it alone

That permanence is rarely something you keep by yourself. David — the Hagerstown truck driver you rode along with in Part 2 of this series — gave me the version that requires a second person in the room.

By now, you’ve seen it a thousand times: Then-rookie Jayden Daniels heaved a Hail Mary after the clock hit triple zeros against Chicago, and it . David was watching with his teenage son:

“Me and my son jumped up and hugged and high-fived without even planning it. Sports is the only thing that gives you that.”

Anybody who’s lived with a teenager knows what that unplanned collision is worth. For a lot of the fathers I talked to, it’s far more intentional.

Stallworth’s teams are all Philadelphia — a city that spends most of the year rooting against Washington. He follows a D.C. team anyway. And he does the legwork:

“I follow the Wizards to a certain degree only because my sons, two of them happen to be Wizards fans. So I’m always keeping them up on updates via the app or the web or whatever the case may be, so they also understand what’s going on, so that we can continue to build our relationship as fans, and not just as father and son.”

Read that last part again. He isn’t following the Wizards to have something to say to his kids. He’s building a second channel to them.

While Stallworth uses the game to reach the sons he has, Scott’s opening a channel to one he might get.

A tech professional in D.C. and an empty-nester, Scott told me he moved into the city from Montgomery County to create opportunities like these:

“My daughter’s dating a new guy, and it’s like, ‘hey, it’s going to be 65 and sunny … do you want to go to the Nats game with us?’ You know, we went there and we sat in the outfield and talked, and was all, you know, amazing … great, great experience.”

You don’t even have to root for the team to feel it. Corey — a proud New Yorker with love for Giants and Knicks, and no particular use for the locals — went to his first game at then-FedEx Field years back, and was talked into wearing a borrowed Sean Taylor jersey by a D.C.-native buddy.

Corey had no stake in the outcome. Yet for three hours, in the middle of a home crowd his own rooting interests taught him to revile, he was helplessly part of it — swept into belonging to a thing that wasn’t even his.

In a city where half the people are from somewhere else and plenty of them are just passing through, that’s no small magic: a game can hand even a rival transplant one afternoon of belonging to the same thing as everyone around him.

The word two strangers reached for

As I kept asking the closing question, near the end I saw a pattern I haven’t been able to shake.

Though the answers scattered — escape, joy, a reason to call your brother, a Tuesday-night break from the news — two people, brought together by this story and little else, answered with the same single word.

Derrick, our “can’t fax a handshake” special-education teacher and volleyball coach, said it first, flatly, like it was obvious:

“There’s hope. There’s always, always, always hope.”

He meant it almost cosmically; Derrick figures two strangers on opposite sides of the planet, watching the same Elite Eight buzzer-beater, feel the exact same thing.

Chris is the other one: a casual fan who’ll tell you he checked out of the modern sports machine a while ago — but in reality, he left the packaging and quietly kept the parts he loves. Yet, by his own account, he’s the last guy you’d expect to wax poetic, but on a different day, in a different conversation, he reached for Derrick’s exact word and, with a laugh, aimed it even higher:

“Hope. I know I say that loosely, and kind of like tongue in cheek, but when I say hope, I don’t think that there’s anything better than watching a person achieve something that for all intents and purposes should not have been achievable.”

The all-in coach and the checked-out casual, landing on the same syllable: Hope.

The part that can’t be put into words

But the truest answer I got didn’t come as a word at all.

It came from David again — the same no-nonsense truck driver who, like a lot of DC die-hards, gives his baseball heart to Baltimore — a man nobody would define as sentimental.

All these years later, he admitted, he still can’t get through the full footage of — 2,131 straight games — without being moved to tears.

“I don’t know why, but it’s just something, like, that’s magical.”

That’s the whole thing, right there. The stoic guy, undone by a 30-year-old clip of a shortstop jogging along a wall of outstretched hands, and the closest he can come to explaining it is magical.

Despite her general disinterest in sports, my old friend Priscilla has a similar story: Her husband, Zach, was traveling abroad for two weeks and at the point she missed him most, she simply turned on the Orioles game in the background to make her feel like he was still in the room with her.

That’s the power of sports as a connector. It ties the former athlete to the game itself, long after the body quit. It ties the non-sports fan to the people they love an ocean away, same as it does to the die-hard strangers side-by-side in the stadium. One feeling, big and strange enough to overwhelm a grown man, closing every one of those distances.

That’s what sports gives you that nothing else does.

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