One aspect of modern sports fandom that tends to bother me a great deal is how it feeds into a culture of escapism.
Any leisure or entertainment is by nature designed to be a pleasant diversion from the more serious or mundane parts of life, but as times get harder it can be dangerous — at least in my estimation — to retreat too far into those distractions.
But one of the great and beautiful powers of sports remains the role it plays as a unifier. In the right doses, the teams we cheer for can lift up and unify a collective group.