HI, MY NAME IS TOM - AND I'M ADDICTED TO THE SENSELESS PAIN AND SUFFERING OF BEING A SPORTS FAN.

Of all the relationships in life, none is more toxic than the one we have with the sports team we love the most. But why is it so impossible to call it quits?

- TOM LAMONT

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, while watching his team lose a must-win game, a fan of the Dallas Cowboys named CJ Boyd removed his replica jersey, balled it tight, and hurled it off the balcony of his apartment in DeSoto, Texas. While his partner looked on, filming Boyd's tantrum on her phone, he chased his floating jersey outside, where he picked it up to hurl it farther along the street. He was topless. It was winter. Boyd didn't feel the cold, he told me, for misery. The clip of his outburst circulated online, and when I watched it I thought: Yeah, that captures it—the circular pain of a fully felt love for a sports team, the seeming impossibility of escape. In the video, Boyd marches up and down the street renouncing, then retrieving, the jersey, never able to throw it far enough to be free.

When a spark has gone, lovers may separate and spouses divorce. Businesses are dissolved all the time without acrimony. Friends quietly stop texting one another. We abandon unsatisfactory jobs, apartments, political parties. Why should it be different with a team?

Of all the many rules governing human behavior—stuff codified by law, etiquette, or religious decree to steady interpersonal relations—the only universal taboo I can think of that's rational, legally sound, ethically neutral, yet carries the social equivalent of the noose is the ditching of a sports team. Among fans, there’s no excuse that will account for it. No exit papers or undertable permissions may be obtained. It’s bone-felt, beyond argument, and if you care to know anything about sports, you know that however degraded, bored, impoverished, or exhausted a fan may feel, their continued fidelity is expected, no matter what.