Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

I am a sports fan. Nearly four years after my daughter graduated from high school, I still follow many of her school’s teams. I keep the score book for a third/fourth-grade rec-league basketball team, not to mention all six of Hopkinton’s middle school and high school basketball teams. I love college football and spend many Sunday afternoons watching pro football on television. As a fan, I have become fascinated by something that happens to some of my fellow fans as they move from rooting for younger athletes to rooting for older ones.

I recently saw a great middle school basketball game. In the game before the one I saw, our team had notched an easy victory, but in the game I saw, our team was without its leading scorer. The team picked up the slack by playing a tough scrappy game with important contributions by a host of players.

We were led by a guard with a sweet three-point shot. By early in the fourth quarter, he had already made four three-pointers. The game was close, and our sharpshooting guard looked like a key to victory, but he had to leave the game with an injury. After a few minutes with an ice pack, he came back into the game and hit two more threes. His final three-pointer came with only a couple of seconds left, and it gave us a one-point victory.

When the buzzer beater dropped in, the crowd erupted with a deafening roar that nearly lifted the roof off the gym. The player who made the game-winning shot will remember that moment for the rest of his life. I am certain of that because I can still remember a home run I once hit in a softball game in an eighth-grade gym class. (Even someone who ran at a glacial pace, as I did, could pick up extra bases on a ball hit to the exchange student stashed out in right field. But I digress.)

Now here’s the thing about the roof-raising cheer in the middle school basketball game. The crowd was focused exclusively on the kid who made the shot, nothing else. And if he had missed, the crowd would have let out a heartfelt moan of sympathy. There would not have been a single boo.

What helped me fully appreciate that middle school cheer was something I learned right before I left my house to go to the gym, the decision by Ohio State University’s starting quarterback, Kyle McCord, to enter the college football transfer portal.

By almost any measure, McCord had a very good season in 2023. Playing behind an offensive line with three new starters, McCord passed for more than 3,100 yards and 24 touchdowns while throwing only six interceptions. He was named third-team All Big Ten. Unfortunately for McCord, two of his six interceptions came against arch rival Michigan. And while those interceptions felt like a punch in the gut to every Buckeye fan, just imagine how Kyle McCord felt about them.

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But immediately after the game, Ohio State “fans” started roasting McCord on social media, and I saw post after post listing quarterbacks from other schools that Ohio State should pursue as replacements for him. As soon as the transfer portal opened, McCord jumped in, concluding that it was in his best interest to complete his college football career elsewhere. In short, Ohio State’s “fans” ran a twenty-one-year-old college student out of town.

When McCord threw his first interception in the Michigan game, I’m sure that there were loud moans in living rooms, man caves, and sports bars across Ohio and beyond. But unlike the moans that follow a missed shot or a botched play in a middle-school game, all of which express sympathy for the player, at least some of the moans that followed McCord’s interception could have been accurately translated as “What is this guy doing to me?” Trust me, I’ve seen and heard those “fans” in action.

So how does a fan’s reaction go from being all about the player to being about the fan? Here’s my best guess. Somewhere between rooting for middle school teams and rooting for major college teams in revenue-generating sports, some fans move from being there for the players to believing that the players are there for them.

Such a belief is certainly appropriate at the professional level, where teams hire players and the players represent the cities in which their teams are located. Moreover, I understand that big-time college athletics are moving closer and closer to a professional model, with NIL (name, image, likeness) money available to players, along with the transfer portal, which makes it easier for a player to move from one college to another.

However, the point of this column is not to decry the economic realities of modern-day big-time college athletics. I’ll be a cranky old man some other day, and I don’t think we could ever get the genie back in the bottle anyway.

But even if we can’t change the big picture, each of us as individual fans can do a little thing that is actually a big thing. Call me naive, but we could try treating the older athletes we root for a bit more like the middle school athletes they once were. We could cheer for them less conditionally, as if they were our sons and daughters, rather than cheering and booing them, as if they were merely our employees.