I’ve had my heart ripped out nine times since school began. Take out the Colts cutting Peyton Manning, not getting asked to Sadie Hawkins and enduring the doleful episode of How I Met Your Mother “Tick Tick Tick” (*SPOILER ALERT* the one where Barney breaks up with Nora, only to have Robin stay with Kevin), and I’m left with five times where CHS sports teams have fallen in the regional finals this year.

Field Hockey, Girls Soccer, Football, Hockey and Boys Basketball all made it to their respective regional finals this year, only to have none of them break through. For the purposes of this article, Swimming and Track will not be considered sports. Not because they don’t require athleticism, and not because the success they enjoyed would ruin this article, but to me, any time a fundamental survival technique is the base of a competition, it’s not a sport. Sorry.

It’s always fun to play the what-if game in sports because it so easily lends itself to it. What if either of B-CC’s goalies had let a goal in earlier? What if we had kicked the field goal on fourth down instead of going for it? What if Magruder star forward Nick Griffin didn’t catch fire in the third quarter? What if Whitman goalie Matthew Bruns didn’t play like Superman against us?

It really is impossible to say, but that’s part of the reason we love sports. Even when the game is over, it’s never really over. The same way people love to replay arguments in their heads, coming up with comebacks they wished they had used, we replay sporting events with just the slightest tweaks.

Any other year, these results would be considered an astounding success, which they were, but after hearing for years about how the Class of 2012 would win at least a few state championships, it’s hard not to feel let down. When Baseball made its Cinderella-esque march through the playoffs last year, eventually falling in the Regional Final, it felt like a wild ride that came out of nowhere because no one saw it coming. This year? We expected these results, so the journey isn’t as thrilling.

In banner games thus far, we have gone 0-4 (Sorry hockey, but at the end of the day you are a club) leaving me to wonder, how will the Class of 2012 be remembered athletically?

In 10 years, no banners will hang in the gym with “Regional Champions, 2011/2012” written on them. It seems more likely that we will be the Buffalo Bills of the early ‘90s, four games away from being the greatest of all time, but never winning the big ones.

Realizing this success will all be forgotten, that we won’t leave the legacy that we had the potential to. That was the ninth time my heart was broken.