Towards the beginning of my tenure as the sports editor here at the Trinitonian, I wrote an article about how little I see Trinity students at games and how greater fan participation can make going to sporting events more enjoyable. I was also quick to note that I myself wasn’t exactly a perfect supporter. Most of the games I went to my sophomore year were soccer games: mostly men’s and, sometimes, women’s. After noting this, I made an effort to go to more women’s soccer, basketball and volleyball games in the fall.

What I also noticed is that I didn’t support our track and field team enough, and have since made an effort to follow our trackletes’ achievements more and go to meets when I can. By the request of my tennis-loving mother, I have also gone to more women’s and men’s tennis matches and, as it always goes, she was right — they’re very fun to watch. I also have made an effort to go to more baseball games and, while I have yet to go to a trap and skeet, umm, shoot-off, I do plan to support them in the near future.

While no college student has the time to go to every single sports game, follow every sports team or even maybe go to an entire game, there will always be some spare time. There will be that one hour time gap where your paper can use a breather and you have watched your last YouTube video explaining that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is actually a masterpiece of cinema (maybe that’s just me) and you can get some fresh air and free entertainment.

You can watch people run really, really, I mean really fast around the track or have a rock thrown at roughly 90 miles per hours at them. Both can be exciting, and occasionally scary, free distractions from the sometimes caging feeling that college can have.

I have already sermoned about the appeal of going out and supporting your fellow students as they pursue their athletic passions, so I won’t continue to yell from that hill. Instead, I’ll explain how unique of a situation we have with the amount of free live sports at our fingertips. As I see it, we will never have this amount of free entertainment — whether it be sporting, artistic or academic — again in our lives. The final two are very important and worthy of note, but I’m constrained by a word limit, so that is for another time and another column.

When again will we have in the same day a free baseball game or two, free tennis matches and possibly a free track meet. If I wanted to get an awful seat to watch Barcelona pummel whatever awful team that is going to try to play them, I’d have to pay 89 euros, or roughly 100 dollars. If I wanted to watch my native Albuquerque Isatopes, a AAA baseball team that is a feeder team for the Colorado Rockies, be bad at baseball, I would have to pay around 20 bucks.

But, as a Trinity student, I can start my morning with a tennis match, get some nachos, feel sick and watch baseball before finishing my night by catching the second game in the baseball doubleheader. I would be floored if at any other time in our lives a Trinity student could do this (unless you are a tennis coach who lives in Seattle and for some reason, on your own volition, wanted to watch the Seattle Mariners play).

We have so much here at Trinity: so much to do, to learn, to see and to enjoy. Free live sports make just a tiny bit of it. But the unique thing they do, in my humble opinion, is they provide a nice break from it all. They serve as a reminder that not everything in life is about crunching numbers, writing papers or analyzing atoms. Sometimes the most simple things can bring the most genuine happiness.

So again, I simply ask, when you are five hours into a 10-hour study session, during your lunch break, check the Trinity Tigers athletics site and watch a game. I did that last weekend and watched an exciting tennis match and, while I don’t know how I did on my French midterm (hopefully not awful), I know that in the long run I’ll be just fine.