Halloween: What Strikes Fear into the Hearts of Sports Fans?

Are you easily frightened by creepy costumes, blood and guts, or are you more terrified by the psychological and paranormal?

As sports fans, we fall victim to both kinds of horror on a regular basis.

We are certainly more accustomed to gore in sports, from shocking collisions to broken bones, to blood streaming down a player's face to…let's face it, you wouldn't even be grossed out by someone's eyeball popping out of its socket at this point, would you?

We, as a collective being of sports consumption, are no longer horrified by injuries on the playing field. Blood and guts won't scare us anymore.

But the paranormal? The psychological? They have been messing with sports fans for centuries. (Cue the creepy laugh.)

Fear. It's the caterpillars that hatch deep inside your abdomen hours before a big game that morph into a feeling of butterflies so real it's as if hundreds of them are trying to fly up your esophagus and into the back of your throat, resting on your uvula before exploding out of every orifice in your head. (It's Halloween, go with me.)

How many playoff games have you watched in the same shirt as the night before, in the same chair with the same brand of beer with the same friends doing the exact same things?

How many times have you blamed a loss on the phone ringing or your significant other bothering you in the bottom-of-the-eighth-with-runners-on-second-and-third-in-a-one-run-game-and-are-you-insane-lady-why-did-you-have-to-pick-right-freaking-now-to-ask-me-to-take-the-trash-out, forcing you to get out of your seat when all hell breaks loose.

Yes, its fear—paranoia—that allows us to irrationally blame the elements of our own existence for our favorite team losing. Don't tell me you've never blamed a loss on Chaos Theory. It always, always, comes back to the butterflies.

What's your worst nightmare in sports?

Is it your alma mater needing one win to become bowl eligible and being up 10 points at halftime to a team they haven't beaten since 1994, knowing something is going to happen to make them lose by double-digits…and then it does?

Is it watching your favorite team buzzsaw their way from a 24-3 lead late in the first half to one of the worst defeats in recent memory? 

Is your worst nightmare going into a two-game set on the road, knowing you only have to win one game after 170 others have come and gone before them to be crowned World Champions, only to watch your team lose the title that was in their grasp for the second year in a row?

Is the worst part of that nightmare realizing that you were one strike away—TWICE—from taking off work to go to a parade, yet again ending with no catharsis, stuck in the fetal position in the corner of your basement wondering why this keeps happening to you?

As if the nightmare couldn't get worse, it feels like you'll never wake up when two days later, you're stuck watching your gridiron heroes get decimated by a character named "Shady," in one of the most blood-curdlingly disastrous losses you can remember.

Is your worst nightmare the smiling mug of Tony Romo hitting golf balls in July?

Perhaps fear isn't a concept based reality at all.

Perhaps real fear comes in the form of fantasy, like needing Wes Welker to score more than four points against the Steelers or watching Drew Brees and the powerful Saints offense crap all over themselves in St. Louis.

Fear is needing Matt Cassel to pull out a 20-point day to stay in the playoff hunt or needing Ryan Mathews to score at least three times with no fumbles to finish the week in first place.

For millions of us, fantasy can be more horrifying than reality.

Are your nightmares more straight forward than that?

Do you dream about the eternal struggle between good and evil?

Were you so convinced that the powers of good would propel you and your team to eternal salvation—after beating the Dolphins, mind you—that you allowed yourself to be swept up by Tim Tebowmania?

Did your fantasy about finally being good again quickly turn into a terrible, haunting vision when the Detroit Lions reminded you that being good in life does not always translate into being good in football?

Maybe all that is too short sighted.

Fear in sports doesn't have to be instantaneous strife while sitting on your couch, desperately trying to digest butterflies.

Maybe real fear is that thumping sound in the back our heads, getting louder and louder each week.

Maybe real fear is knowing that your team is one of the worst in the game, but may not be bad enough to get that franchise player you need to rebuild.

Or, maybe it's being bad enough and getting a chance to get that franchise guy, but fearing that your team is already so tethered to an aging, injured, high-priced superstar they won't roll the dice on the future just yet and you'll spend the next 20 years wondering what could have been.

Fear, as it were, can come in the form of a no-huddle offense, led by a signal caller who is gesticulating wildly before running a stretch play for six yards. Or, as it is, fear may be not having that, or anything else, anymore.

It could be that fear is worrying about what won't be there tomorrow.

Sure, going to a parade is swell, but was it also a goodbye party for the world's best hitter? Has the nightmarish countdown to marginalization already begun?

For some, that's a fear that a World Series ring may not even be able to quell.

Sadly, through all that, fear in sports can top the dread of nothingness.

No amount of smoke and mirrors can produce the illusion of anything resembling professional basketball this Halloween.

It seems there is no end in sight to this nightmare anytime soon, with even more games lost to the lockout and the panic that we still won't have an NBA season come the turn of the new year.

Of all our fears in the world of sports, not having them is the worst fear of all.