I like to call it "New Year’s Psychology": the rollercoaster of emotion people ride on Day One. It was on full display this weekend, as individuals and groups pondered the future and the impending end of another season. Players make resolutions, just like people trying to drop a bad habit or develop a healthy new one.
 
We football fans are currently enjoying college and pro playoffs. Now, football is not the same as 'life'. Football creates an artificial world where teams are eliminated until one stands at the top of the pyramid. High performance must be concentrated into brief, intense efforts in just a couple of hours per contest.

On Sunday, I noticed a sort of mania. Some teams have had a successful season, while others have struggled. And within those teams are people, some of whom have performed well while others did poorly. This fact affects the psyches of both individuals and teams as they ponder what has been — and what will come. I saw this mania in all the games I watched, but just a couple of examples will suffice. I watched the Bucs’ offense play one of its better games. On that same team, defensive players had been performing well for weeks, while the offense was in a slump.  
 
The Bucs won Sunday and finally secured a playoff spot — but Sunday tells me little about how they will perform in the playoffs. Will the Bucs’ offense have a good postseason or was Sunday a brief fireworks show?
 
The Packers also had an extraordinary outing against the Vikings (who are already division champions). There was a frenzy in Green Bay, affecting both players and fans — noticeably higher than the usual weekly frenzy.

Both individual players and whole teams seem to have days when they are energetically and emotionally up — while others are down.

Do these sports examples mean anything?

My hunch is that people who plan, practice and perform consistently have the best chance of success — over any reasonable period of time. Unlike football, we spectators are not eliminated by one bad day. Nor are we crowned world champions.

What value is the hype of a 'new year'? Riding a wave of emotion will sometimes work — for a day — but those who do ‘right things right’ on a regular basis seem to have a very good day-after-day.
 
Getting back to the world of sports playoffs, teams must come together at the right time. Pundits point out players and teams who ‘get hot’. But, I believe, that which gets hot can also turn cold. Time alone will tell. 
 
It’s great fun for us spectators to enjoy the drama of sports playoffs. But it’s nice to know that our lives do not depend upon any one-day mania.
 
Happy Next 365 Days!