Even when they’re outmanned, outgunned and even overwhelmed, they keep battling.
We saw three such stories in just the past few days.
On Sept. 30, the Indiana Fever’s WNBA season ended when they dropped the fifth game of a best-of-five playoff series to the Las Vegas Aces.
The Fever’s season ground to a halt when the Aces finally pulled away in overtime to win the game, 107-98, and advanced to the league finals.
The game was almost brutally hard fought. The Fever battled the much more experienced and much deeper Aces to a draw in regulation play, despite the fact that one of their best players, All-Star guard Kelsey Mitchell, left the game with an injury in the third quarter and another, All-Star center Aliyah Boston, fouled out in the fourth quarter.
No matter.
The Fever’s bench and role players stepped up and showed enough grit to build a road from the Hoosier state to one of the oceans. They scrapped and scrapped and scrapped.
That shouldn’t be a surprise.
The team could have packed it in early in the season when an injury took supernova superstar Caitlin Clark off the court. That started a string of injuries and ailments that almost derailed the year for the Fever.
But they summoned the will and the skill to beat Atlanta in the first round of the playoffs. Then they came within a whisker of making it to the WNBA Finals.
Along the way, they demonstrated just how powerful sheer determination can be.
The next night, another storybook season wound down.
For more than a decade, the Cincinnati Reds have been one of baseball’s doormats, a perpetual also-ran from a small-market city. Few serious baseball observers expected much from the team this year.
Those observers, though, didn’t include Manager Terry Francona in their estimations.
Francona, a self-proclaimed “baseball lifer,” is nearing the end of what should be—no, must be—a Hall of Fame career. A solid player, he has proved, again and again and again, to be a spectacular manager.
In his stint with the Boston Red Sox, he ended the curse of the Bambino—the hex the baseball gods supposedly visited on Beantown for shipping Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees—by winning the team’s first World Series in 86 years. Three years later, in 2007, he led the Red Sox to the game’s most prized circle once again.
His gift as a leader has been transforming team cultures steeped in disappointment and defeat into squads that expect and achieve excellence.
During his next stay—in Cleveland—he took over a team that had known little but heartbreak for a decade.
At his first press conference as Cleveland’s manager, someone asked him how long it would take for the team to become competitive.
“How long will it take me to walk to the clubhouse?” Francona responded.
In 2016, he led a Cleveland squad that had had its pitching staff depleted by injuries into what became one of the greatest World Series ever played.
That classic went the full seven games. It was decided in extra innings of the seventh game when the Chicago Cubs claimed the crown.
Over the seven games, the two teams scored exactly the same number of runs.
It was that close.
This was Francona’s first year in Cincinnati. Somehow, he miracle-motivated a team that wasn’t among the league’s leaders in hitting or pitching into the postseason.
The Reds lost to the much more powerful Los Angeles Dodgers, but the team gave its fans a reason to look forward to next year.
The night after the Reds fell, Francona’s old team—the Cleveland Guardians—lost an elimination game to the Detroit Tigers.
In July, the Guardians were 15.5 games behind Detroit for the division lead.
Cleveland rallied, though, and began winning game after game. Through sheer hustle, they closed the gap on the Tigers and ended up winning the division.
It was the greatest comeback in major league history.
The two teams met in the playoffs, where it became clear the Tigers had many more weapons than the Guardians did.
But Cleveland fought gamely to the end.
There are many reasons not to feel heartened by the world today.
These three teams aren’t among those reasons.
