RIGHT OF CENTER: LIFE'S GAME HAS WINS AND LOSSES

Most people likely associate December with the Christmas holiday. I'm no exception. But the thing I relate most with the month has little to do with the birth of our Lord.

To me, December is the month of warm afterglow. It's a time each year to recline and reflect with the self-satisfaction of making it through another ... football season. Oh I know, December also is a time to reflect on the year past and to speculate over the year to come.

But I can't help but link the season with football's end. Professional football will continue for a couple months more, but I'm referring here to the real football season, when local high schools clash on the gridiron Friday night and ABC's college game of the week dominates Saturday afternoon TV viewing. As a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan -- a professional team that last won its division in 1972 -- I have little affinity for the NFL's waning months.

Thanks to the Jackson Indians the annual fall fling with my high school sweetheart and first love -- football -- continued to the apex of the sport: the state high school championship game. The Southeast Missouri State Indians also inspired the type of fervor only a successful football team can ignite20in a college town.

But that was last week, and all that remains are memories and a lingering repose that eschews the inevitable dry time to come. In terms of other spectator sports, I trudge through the winter, spring and summer months eagerly anticipating two-a-days in August. It truly is a time to stoically endure the sports world.

I'm speaking of my love for football. But in many ways sports competition is a metaphor for life. An avid football fan who this year basks in the local team's banner season, next year might suffer through a rebuilding year where the wins are rare. Of course life, with its peaks and valleys, is the same way.

What separates the good football program from a team that merely has a good season every few years is how the coaches and players, and to some extent the fans, respond during those rebuilding years.

In the same way, a person's course in life never is fixed while atop the mountain. Instead our character is forged in the valleys, those long dry times when hardship abounds and triumph is sparse.

Any athlete will contend that a loss is an invaluable teacher. If an athlete embraces the lessons of a loss, he emerges a better athlete and better prepared for the next hardship. But how do most of us respond in the dry times? We try to avoid them with silly diversions. We refuse to face the inevitable pain and frustration of failure. We run from it. We whine about it. We blame others for it.

It might put a few psychiatrists out of work, but it's time we stopped looking to assuage our suffering and began to embrace it and look for the lessons it imparts. My dad used to tell me, "You're not only responsible for your actions; you are equally responsible for your reactions."

I know it's true in football. A loss doesn't make a football team a loser. The key is to take responsibility for the loss, learn from it, then prepare to win the next game. The team that makes excuses, refuses to work to compensate for its weaknesses, or quits, chooses its fate.

In the same way, we choose to be victims when we wallow in self-pity and whine incessantly about all the bad things other people have done to us, which only guarantees that we never will emerge as winners from the off months that follow a rebuilding season of life.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.