The Championship Specter

It's a fallacy to say that "it's championship time again." The championship never went away because, in America, there's always a championship going on. Doesn't matter what. We've got Super Bowls, World Series's, Finals, and Tournaments. Don't you dare forget Bassmasters and The Masters, beer pong, ping pong, volleyball, football and futbol, NCAA to NAIA. Americans love their alphabets to skip hand in big, strapping athletic hand with our sports.

You've got the MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL, NHL, SEC, WAC, PBA, PBR, NASCAR, PGA and LPGA, WNBA, NHRA, WBO – those 15 different professional leagues, ranging from bowling (PBA), bull-riding (PBR0 and boxing (WBO), utilize 14 of the 26 letters in the English alphabet.

The calendar is so full of championships thanks to every sport ever played in America, even questionable sport activities like "rock, paper, scissors" have championships, they make a can of sardines look roomy.

At the moment, the world is preparing itself for its grandest, so-epic-no-single-adjective-can-do-it-justice soccer tournament a.k.a. the FIFA World Cup and as a pregame for Americans, we are getting the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Playoffs out of the way, not to mention the NCAA's spring sports too.

Spoiler alert!: Both professional sports championships going on right now just lost their most marketable monsters. The King and The  Kid – LeBron James and Sidney Crosby – never showed up for the biggest moments of their lives to date.

Let's start with The Kid. He's done more than James, although both have little gold medallions centerpiece Olympic necklaces, Crosby has pressed his lips to Sir Stanley's Cup, while James' fingerprints have never made their mark on the Larry O'Brien championship trophy. Point is, Crosby went through his 13 playoff games in 2010, scoring only six goals, only one in the past five games. The teeny tiny fact that has floored all the experts like an open ice check from Claude Lemieux is that The Kid's Penguins were looking strong to repeat, but got ousted from the ice by the No. 8 – out of eight – seeded Montreal Canadiens.

Read that again.

The defending Stanley Cup champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins, with their gold medal supernova status star Sidney Crosby, were eliminated by the worst team in their bracket, the Montreal Canadiens in six games.

Much of the same in the NBA. The Association's King and the Cleveland Cavaliers savior, James became "Lay-down" James as he was beaten by the much older and evidently more feisty Celtics squad. On paper, the James Gang should have taken their best record in the NBA and No. 1 seeding and rubbed it in those gritty, grimy and now, still playing Celt noses. The Cavs have broken more hearts than the day that Brooklyn Decker married Andy Roddick. Squared. No, Cubed. Heck, no exponent could even compete. The already brokenhearted Clevelanders, who, as a city haven't experienced championship bliss since the Browns won the Super Bowl in 1964, have lost all hope.

The most famous thing their over-polluted city has is, well, Drew Carey. LeBron will probably leave Cleveland on the Free Agency express, laughing all the way to the bank, while Cleveland sits by in a puddle of pity, wondering "why me?"  Cleveland is like the  guy that tries really, REALLY hard to impress the supermodel girl, but it's never enough and the chick ditches him for a square-jawed, trust-fund beau in the Corvette. First Sabbathia, now James – probably. That square-jawed hombre symbolizes New York City in Cleveland's case.

The upset epidemic doesn't only effect the pros, though. Our very own AASU Pirates were chasing history, until history decided to stop running and simply fight back. History took its shiniest fiberglass finished tennis racket, and broke the son of a gun right over the Pirates head.

Both the Men's and Women's tennis teams were searching for the elusive three-peat, a wild fantastical achievement that only the Jordans and Jeters of the world have experienced, but the men came up short in upset fashion.

Their season was phenomenal, no one is denying that, but the No. 2 ranked Pirates went down to their despised rival, the No. 4 Barry Buccaneers. The Bucs have lost the last two National Championships to the Pirates.

That makes the poison of defeat even more bitter.

The antidote for all the losing that is sure to plague every championship ever – someone has to lose in order for someone else to hoist that blindingly bling-y trophy in the air – no matter which sport, is the win. Not just any win.

The WIN.

So the only remaining hopes for the Pirates of AASU, a small population of Division II faithful are our still breathing Lady Pirates – who are in line for their tennis three-peat – and the Lady Pirate Softball team – who ship out for their postseason championship conquest on May 14-16 for some South/Southeastern Super-Regional action.