I scored two goals today in the first round playoff game for our Sunday soccer league.  Its cool how scoring a goal always carries with it some of the same smell and taste, no matter the competition.  You get a very specific thrill the moment you realize that you’ve scored which is immediately followed by trying to look cool and purposeful as you run back to midfield to restart play.  The aftertaste is similar too.  Getting a goal infuses the game with an intensity and energy that can even carry on through the rest of the day, depending.  So scoring is cool.  The only problem today was that one of my goals was for the other team.

The first goal, the one I scored for our team, was weird too because while I did put it in the correct net, it was really just a tap in.   As it happened, I made a run and was on the receiving end of a perfect pass.  These types of through balls that are laid with just the right amount of weight, at just the right angle, at just the right time, are why I play and watch soccer.  The goal was basically an afterthought the second that my team mate served up that pass.  But that wasn’t the way people reacted, with the rest of the team cheering me on for the goal.  It felt kind of weird, for the aforementioned reasons, but I still had that momentarily and immediate thrill when the ball went in, and that renewed feeling of energy and purpose when the whistle restarted play.  It just didn’t last very long.

About a minute later, in an eerily similar maneuver, I made another run.  Only this time it was to try and keep up with an opponent cutting across the middle of our goal.  In a move that took much more athleticism than my previous moment of glory, I reached across to toe poke a cross away at the last possible second, and knocked the ball directly into our net.  I hadn’t even looked at our goal running on to the play, but was focused on trying to get to the cross coming in. Well, I succeeded.

There were a couple of weird things going on here.  The first is that technically I scored two goals in about a minute, which doesn’t happen very often.  The second is what I call the Vegas principle, which is that it feels worse to lose money than it feels good to win money, at least for me anyway, which is why I don’t gamble.  Whatever the immediate thrill of scoring a goal that counts for your team is, scoring for the other team provokes an immediate and opposite reaction that I would have easily traded my actual goal for to make go away.  It wasn’t even that much of a donkey of a play, as the opposing player may have scored with his own tap in if I hadn’t tried to stop it, but none of that mattered.  A minute ago, I was the receiver of too much praise. Now, I was the goat.  And in all of this, the two people who made both goals happen, the ones who passed the balls into the dangerous positions in the first place, got almost none of the credit.  Fortunately for me and our team, we ended up winning by a goal.  So, the net effect of my day of goal scoring was literally negligible and we walked away with the win.  Given the Vegas principle though, that’s not how I’m going to remember it, with the image of the ball rolling across the wrong goal line being the one that sticks.

And while that’s slightly sad, please know that countless others have suffered similarly so that you could enjoy funny clips like the ones below.