After a back-to-back pair of wins versus the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets, the Orlando Magic surely imagined they were about to bounce back from the December slide, and fans surely shared the sentiment. Six losses later, broken up by just a single win versus the woeful Atlanta Hawks, sentiment once again turns the other direction, toward the lottery and tanking and all that fun stuff.
We, as fans, have gotten into a bad habit of rooting for the team right up to the moment they can’t reasonably make the playoffs, then rooting as hard as possible for them to lose every game after that.