Apr 28, 2015 4 min read

Here’s how boring Sunday afternoon was: I watched five minutes of college women’s lacrosse on TV.

A team of young adult females racing around a field while wearing hot pants and using butterfly nets to catch and throw a solid rubber ball reminds me of Labrador retrievers playing fetch. About the only difference I saw is that the lacrossers didn’t at some point roll around on their backs on the field, tongues lolling and appendages flapping. That’s apparently reserved for FIFA soccer players on just about any foul.

I was prepared to switch off the game, which ended in an always-thrilling 8-8 tie, and flip to something almost as boring – NASCAR racing. Despite its mind-numbing, counter-clockwise tedium, NASCAR at least offers the possibility of a participant crashing into a wall and exploding. (When’s the last time you saw a lacrosse player explode? And if you have, is it on YouTube?) But just as I was prepared to use the remote, two words stopped me: “sudden victory.”

This was a new term to me. I quickly divined it meant the first team to score would win. But why not “sudden death?” Has it disappeared from the sports vernacular? Is it because death is not a ladylike word? Or was it unceremoniously booted by the same well-meaning imbeciles who decided there should never be winners and losers in youth sports? Because, you know, losing that Little League game might someday make Johnny or Susie climb to the top of Old Main and start picking off classmates with a sniper rifle.

Even the usually omniscient Wikipedia isn’t sure from whence “sudden victory” came. The writer of the Wiki on “sudden death” offers only this: “This variant became one of announcer Curt Gowdy’s idiosyncrasies in 1971 when the AFC divisional championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins went into overtime.” The same article also contains this unintentionally hilarious tidbit: “Sudden death is also prevalent in youth play, for the safety of players.”

But using “sudden victory” is like saying Gen. George Armstrong Custer didn’t lose at Little Big Horn, the Indians just pulled it out in OT. It’s an attempt to be politically correct.

It’s avoiding at all cost words that might make someone feel bad or might make the speaker look bad – like the running joke among UPMC PR writers when I worked there: “The patient didn’t die, he just failed to achieve his wellness potential.”

OK, I get it. We don’t want to traumatize our kids. You didn’t lose, honey, the other guys won. Why not begin in infancy? After all, the same fear should make us avoid the bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep …” because it ends with “If I should die before I wake …” But what has this logic to do with adults?

“Sudden victory” doesn’t lessen the sting of defeat for the, um, almost winners. And isn’t a sudden death preferable to wasting away slowly while your relatives pick out which bits of jewelry they want? He didn’t die; the Grim Reaper won in sudden victory.

This much should be clear to anyone over the age of 3: In life, we all lose – some unfairly, some more often than others. It’s how you deal with it that counts. This is not a new idea.

In 1908, American sportswriter Grantland Rice said as much in his poem “Alumnus Football,” which includes this oft-quoted stanza:

“For when the One Great Scorer comes

To mark against your name,

He writes – not that you won or lost –

But how you played the Game.”

Almost 100 years later, rocker Tom Petty had this to add: “Even the losers get lucky sometimes.”

Even if they lose in sudden death.