No matter what sport you watch, no matter what team you chose to cheer for, there is one underlying feeling that everyone yearns for in sports; the thrill of seeing your favorite team win a championship. Winning a championship is the one main goal of any sport. If your team does not win a championship, you are left with that dreaded feeling of having to wait a full year in hopes that your team can win it next year. Many cities, such as Cleveland, are forced to live with this feeling year after year. But even Cleveland fans have gotten used to losing in every sport. They have realized that their teams have, for the most part, never been great and will never be great. But the feeling of losing is perhaps at its greatest when your team goes into the season with such high expectations only to falter in the playoffs. Such is the case here in Philadelphia.

In the past 20 years, Philadelphia has won a putrid 2 championships in its 4 major sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey), one in 1983, and one in 2008. Cities such as Atlanta and Boston have watched their teams win multiple championships in a year for multiple years in that same time span. Every year, each one of Philadelphia’s teams goes into the season with sky high expectations. The Phillies had four maybe five aces on their team. The Eagles had their dream team. The Flyers are Stanley Cup favorites. The Sixers are the team on the rise. Never has a city received so much hype prior to the season. Yet each year all the hype seems to fade away as the team fails to win the championship. 

Within the past 2 years, a new trend has emerged in Philadelphia. Every time one of the Philadelphia teams makes the playoffs, they lose to the eventual champion of that sport. Since the Phillies 2008 World Series title, they have lost in the playoffs to the New York Yankees, the San Francisco Giants, and, most recently, the St. Louis Cardinals. Each year those teams went on to become the World Series champion. The flyers lost the Chicago Blackhawks in 2010 in the Stanley Cup Finals, and lost last year to the Boston Bruins. The Eagles lost to the Green Bay Packers. Even the Sixers, after a hiatus from the playoffs, almost suffered from the same fate as their opponents who ousted them in the playoffs, the Miami Heat, finished just two games shy of a championship. It is a continuing trend for many years now, and fans are starting to believe this feeling is worse than being the worst team in the league.

How long can this new “curse” continue to plague the city of brotherly love? Fans ask themselves this question every time playoffs for a particular sport’s playoffs come around. Year after year we think that it will happen this year; we will break this Philly curse. But we are left “hangning out to dry” every year. The only thing Philly fans can do now is sit and wait. Wait for that championship to arrive. It has to come eventually. It’s only a matter of time before we rid this curse for good.