May 26, 2016 3 min read

By the time you read this, you Penguins fans will know whether the team moved on to the Stanley Cup finals. My deadline came several hours before they played game seven. Maybe by now you are happily looking forward to the finals, or maybe you’ve had to pack your Crosby jersey for the summer.

Me, I don’t have a Crosby jersey, or a Roethlisberger jersey or a baseball cap with a “P” on it, for that matter. Sometimes, on autumn Sundays when I go to the store for my New York Times, I feel alone in a sea of black and gold jerseys. I look around at all the fans buying their chips and dip for the game and think, what’s the matter with me?

It’s not that I don’t care about Pittsburgh sports – it’s that I don’t care enough to make any one game the center of my day. This casual approach makes me something of an outsider in a town like Pittsburgh.

Perhaps I’m missing that gene, although I am the daughter of a sports fan. Among my earliest memories is the sound of crickets chirping below the voice of Bob Prince as my dad sat on the front stoop listening to the game on warm summer nights in Finleyville. In winter, he’d sit at the kitchen table with a beer, listening to the hockey game.

You’d think all that sports play by play would have hooked me in somehow; it was background noise to me. I grew up hearing it but not following it.

Still, nothing’s more exciting than being at a hockey game. Following the puck from up in peanut heaven, I’ve felt as much a sports fan as the ones in the jerseys down front. The difference is that after the game, I’d go back to being casually interested. In that way, maybe a game is the same experience as attending the ballet, or a musical – a cultural event and something fun to do.

Sometimes, on those Steeler Sundays, I would look around and wonder how it would feel if, instead of jerseys with the names of athletes on them, people wore jerseys with the names of authors or symphony musicians. And on the days when the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has a big televised concert, stores would be filled with people in Manfred Honeck jerseys buying chips and dip. That I am more familiar with what Honeck and the symphony are up to in Europe than with the playoff record of Kris Letang says something about where I fit in as a Pittsburgher.

I wish I were a more fervent sports fan. It would be fun to be caught up in collective groundswell of hope. I see all the people in their jerseys and watch the people in the stands and I understand it.

But I don’t feel it, not in my heart the way the rest of you do. Sometimes on those Steeler Sundays, I feel like the dinosaur sitting on land while the ark sails off without me. And all the animals are partying.

As I wrote this, I was hoping the Penguins would win the Eastern Conference finals. If they did, I hope they go on to win the Cup. But if they didn’t, I won’t be crushed. And I guess that’s what makes me different.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.