A little bit of perspective.

This post is about sports, but I promise it has substance. Hang in there.

Losses in baseball don't get much worse than the Brewers' loss yesterday. They were up by 4 with two outs and nobody on in the Cubs' bottom of the ninth ... and somehow found a way to lose.

Fortunately for my own sanity and that of everyone who would've been around me, I was working while all this happened. But as soon as the boxscore came across the wire, my head was firmly implanted in my hands. A coworker who's a big Cubs fan walked into work 15 minutes later, stopped at my desk, gave me a look as if one of my family members had died and just said, "Mark ... I'm sorry."

I tried to vent to Dana, but with 13 Brewers losses in the last 17 games, I long ago used up all my empathy points with her. So I did the only thing I could think to do to get myself out of my funk: I called my grandma.

My grandma is the diehardest Cubs fan I know--she's been following the team for 70 years. She started listening to the team on the radio with her dad as a little girl in Wisconsin, long before Milwaukee had its own major league team. Now she watches every single Cubs game on TV while she knits at home down in Texas.

Now, calling my grandma was a major violation of the unwritten rules of sports fandom--if your team gets beat in gutwrenching fashion by your rival, your buddy who's a fan of that team calls you--you never call them. To do that would be asking for punishment, voluntarily subjecting yourself to gloating during your worst hour.

But I needed to remind myself that someone--and not just someone, my grandma--was made happy by yesterday's game. And it was so good to hear her laughing about the game, talking about how she was thisclose to turning it off, marveling at one of the Cubs' ejection in extra innings, asking about the Brewers' starting rotation.

I'm usually driven nuts by the Cubs fans' bellyaching about 100 years since a championship. I mean, how many of those years have most of those fans lived through, let alone been a fan through? 20? 30? 5? But my grandma is the real deal--she's gone almost three-quarters of a century as a dedicated Cubs fan without a World Series title. As much as I get upset about one September collapse, that's misery. And she takes it all in stride, just a laugh and a sigh when they blow it yet again, and a genuine joy when they do well. I could stand to learn a lot from that.

So if--or, let's be honest, when--the Brewers don't make the playoffs, I'll be rooting for the Cubs to win it all. It's heresy for a Brewers fan, but it's just the right thing to do by Grandma.