The Portland Trail Blazers appear to be looking up during their 2025-26 season. They\u2019ll be competing in the NBA Play-In Tournament for the first time ever, hoping to return to the NBA Playoffs for the first time since 2021. But the road hasn\u2019t been easy and no summits have been topped yet.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s frustrating at least one Portland fan who offered this submission to the Blazer\u2019s Edge Mailbag. Admittedly, this was submitted 10 days ago or so, but I feel better answering it now than I would have then. Take a look.<\/p>\n
How do you handle all the disappointment and all the losing? I swear if I see another blown lead or another blown play or another stupid loss when we should be making the playoffs I\u2019m going to scream. This is the hardest part of being a Blazers fan. I\u2019ve done it for year and I\u2019m not sure how much more I can take.<\/p>\n
A Long Time Season Ticket Holder<\/p>\n
One of the great things about sports, ALTSTH, is that tomorrow is always another day. Since you wrote this question the Blazers have prevailed in a really nice game in Minnesota, had a big-margin win against Brooklyn, and even posted a couple more W\u2019s. They\u2019ve assured themselves of a chance at the Play-In. They\u2019re going to fight for the chance to make the playoffs with just one win. If everything goes right, Portland\u2019s game against the Los Angeles Clippers one week from today should be huge, meaningful, everything you\u2019d want out of a late-season contest. There\u2019s ALWAYS a bounce-back. And you\u2019re going to be there for it.<\/p>\n
Heck, I almost died two years ago of a heart attack. In fact, I was dead on my kitchen floor. My son\u2019s perseverance and my daughter\u2019s quick thinking remotely calling paramedics were the only things that brought me back. And yet here I am, happy and healthy, fit and handsome as hell, and writing about the Blazers every day as if they\u2019re the most important thing in the universe. If I can do that, you can too! Or at least you can overcome a few losses, or even a few years of losing.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, as I thought about this question I thought about my own Blazers fandom. And you\u2019re right! There are a lot of hard things about it! Which got me to thinking\u2026<\/p>\n
You tabbed losing games as the hardest thing about the process. As I considered, I came across the following things that I, personally, think are harder than losing games. They\u2019re in no particular order:<\/p>\n
I think I could take any number of losses better than I take those things.<\/p>\n
What about you, fellow readers? What things would you consider worse than losing in your life of sports fandom? Share them in the comments section below! And if you\u2019d like to send in your own question, you can email it to blazersub@gmail.com. We\u2019ll try to get to as many as we can!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers appear to be looking up during their 2025-26 season. They\u2019ll be competing in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,37787,38295,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-677040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-portland-trail-blazers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-blazers","10":"tag-blazers-analysis","11":"tag-blazers-mailbags","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-portland","14":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","15":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","16":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116286216733953433","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}