There’s a photograph I come back to more often than I can explain.

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I’ve scrolled past it hundreds of times over the years, and somehow I stop every single time.

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At first glance, it isn’t much to look at.

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Three people are walking away from the camera through a gray concrete tunnel beneath Wrigley Field. My dad is in the middle. My younger brother is on one side, wearing an oversized Derek Lee T-shirt. I’m on the other, dressed head to toe in pink, each of us holding one of his hands.

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You can't see our faces.

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There’s no game being played. The ivy isn’t in bloom. There’s no iconic view of the scoreboard or the marquee on Clark Street.

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To anyone else, it’s probably just another family photo. To me, it’s one of the most important photos I own.

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It was taken during a 4th of July weekend tour of Wrigley Field when I was eight years old. I don’t remember where that tunnel led or what we talked about that afternoon. I couldn’t tell you what exhibits we stopped to see or which stories my dad shared along the way.

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What I remember is the feeling.

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Everything felt enormous. Important. Like I was standing somewhere that mattered.

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At eight years old, you don't understand history. You don't understand tradition. You don't understand why your dad lights up when he talks about the Cubs or why a ballpark can mean so much to someone.

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You only know that it matters to the people you love.

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That feeling has stayed with me far longer than any box score ever could.

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For years, I assumed that photograph stayed with me because I loved baseball.

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It was the obvious explanation.

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But the older I’ve gotten - and especially after spending the last seven years building a career in sports - the less I believe that’s true.

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We’re taught that sports are about championships. Rivalries. Walk-off home runs. Buzzer beaters. Trophy celebrations.

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Those are the moments that fill highlight reels. They’re rarely the moments we carry with us.

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We remember the parent who took us to our first game. The friend we celebrated beside after a championship. The family traditions built around a schedule of games that eventually became part of our lives.

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The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that sports don’t create our best memories.  They become part of the memories we’re already making.

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I think it’s the entire reason that sports matter.

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Ten years later, I found myself lying in bed listening to Game 7 of the World Series on the radio.

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Not because the TV was broken. Not because I wanted to avoid everyone else. Because I couldn't bring myself to watch.

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If you're a lifelong Cubs fan, you probably understand why. If you're not, it's difficult to explain what that season felt like.

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For 108 years, Cubs fans had learned to expect heartbreak. Every promising season carried the weight of every season before it. Hope always came with a disclaimer.

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Now they were one win away.

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I wanted them to win more than I can put into words. I also wasn't sure I could survive watching them lose. 

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So I listened instead.

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Every pitch felt heavier than the one before. The rain delay seemed endless. Every inning after that stretched time in ways that didn’t feel possible.

Then the final out was recorded.

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What happened next had almost nothing to do with baseball.

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People poured into the streets. Strangers hugged strangers. Car horns echoed through neighborhoods long after midnight.

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For one night, Chicago wasn't a collection of neighborhoods. It was one city.

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For years, I thought those moments stayed with me because they were historic. Walking through one of the most iconic ballparks in America. Watching the Cubs finally break a 108-year drought. 

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Of course I'd remember those things.

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But the older I've gotten, the less I think history is what made those memories last.

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Every sports fan has moments like these. Maybe yours didn’t happen at Wrigley Field. Maybe it happened under the lights of a Friday night football game, in the upper deck of a hockey arena, or on the couch with your grandparents. 

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The details change. The feeling doesn’t.

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Sports aren’t the only place where we make life’s most meaningful memories. We remember graduations, weddings, birthdays, and the moments we say goodbye to the people we love.

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So why do sports stay with us in the same way?

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I think it’s because sports have a way of weaving themselves into lives that are already being lived. They're there when a parent takes their child to a first game. They're there when friends crowd into a basement to watch a championship. They're there when an entire city celebrates together and when it mourns together. 

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Years later, the score fades.  The people never do. The game becomes part of the memory, not the other way around.

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I think that’s what eventually led me into sports.

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I was 17 when I started working in sports. At the time, I would’ve told you I was there because I loved the games. That was the answer I gave everyone else, and, if I’m honest, it was the answer I believed. But the longer I’ve worked in this industry, the more I’ve realized the games were only part of what drew me in.

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Families weren’t just coming to watch a game. They were building traditions. Parents were introducing their children to the teams they grew up loving. Friends were spending summer nights together. Birthdays, anniversaries, and first dates unfolded in the stands. For a few hours, thousands of strangers became a community.

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The game mattered. It just wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

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At 17, I was focused on learning the business. I wanted to understand communications, marketing, promotions - everything that happened behind the scenes of the games I’d grown up watching.

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And I did. I also started noticing things no one had hired me to notice.

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The family that sat in the same section every Sunday. The little kid whose jersey hung almost to their knees because they hadn’t grown into it yet. The grandparent who is introducing the next generation to the game they love.

 

At first, those moments felt like background details. Now, I think they were the story all along.

 

The game gave people a reason to gather, but what they were really creating was something much bigger. Traditions. Memories. A sense of belonging that would outlast the final score.

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I’ve been fortunate to work across baseball, hockey, racing, and soccer, and while every sport has its own culture, the people are remarkably similar.

Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve watched parents pass their fandom to their children. I’ve watched cities rally around a team. I’ve watched people plan birthdays, vacations, and family traditions around what, to everyone else, looks like an ordinary schedule of games.

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That’s when I realized something I wish I’d understood sooner: Sports organizations aren’t just in the business of putting on games, they’re in the business of creating places where people make memories.

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I think that’s what made me fall in love with this industry.

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Not the final scores. The stories.

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The father bringing his daughter to her first game because his dad once did the same for him. The friends who’ve shared the same seats for twenty years. The city that feels a little smaller - and a little closer - after a championship.

 

Marketing just happens to be the way I get to help tell those stories. It’s also why I started writing. Not because I have all the answers. If anything, I have more questions today than I did walking into my first internship seven years ago. 

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Every stop in my career has taught me something different about the business of sports but I keep coming back to the same question I started asking every time I look at that photograph: Why do sports matter so much to us?

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Not just the games.

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The people. The traditions. The cities. The memories. The communities that somehow grow around a logo, a jersey, or a stadium.

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I don’t think sports are built on wins and losses, I think they’re built on belonging and if that’s true, then maybe we should spend less time talking about how teams market themselves and more time talking about how they create that feeling. Not marketing tactics, not social media trends, not ticket sales. It’s about the stories, ideas, and people that make sports matter long after the final whistle.

 

Long after we forgot the score, we remember how it felt.