I've recently been following Kansas City Royals discussion boards following their loss to the Giants.

Fans are mostly putting on brave faces. "We had a great year". "If anyone had told me in April that the Royals would lose a World Series that came down to the final at bat I would have been ecstatic".

While those sentiments are true from some hypothetical fan-value perspective, I am certain that unless the Royals manage to actually win a World Series in the next few years, every fan of that team will feel that 2014 was the one that got away. No one will be proudly remembering their great run, they will be gnashing their teeth at something nearly achieved.

Winning in sports is hard. Winning championships that much harder.

While being a Lion fan hasn't lended itself to regrets in my lifetime, I can certainly think of fanbases who must feel like their team squandered great opportunities. The Eagles were probably the poster child for this in the '00s. The 49ers may be lining up as the next one.

Being a Viking fan must be particularly painful as they had some of the greatest teams in NFL history at the end of the '60s and into the '70s with no titles, only to come back in the '90s with more dominant teams that fell on their playoff faces. The Bills and Browns were legendary for disappointing their fans, and I'm not sure that the one Greatest Show champonship for the Rams really makes up for their repeated failures in the '70s and in the years since '99.

I'm not going to go out of my way to feel sorry for Royal Fan, or to root for that team to redeem their fans' collective faith. I've got my own disappointing teams to root for and my own pile of schadenfreude to collect.

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