1-0 Today - October 2020

"Forever is composed of nows." - Emily Dickinson

Those of you who know me well will remember that I am a diehard Indianapolis Colts fan. This essay is about our 2018 season in which Andrew Luck, our quarterback, made a massive comeback after dealing with incessant injuries for the past few seasons. 

The season got off to a terrible start. After losing their week 6 matchup to a bad Jets team to set their record at 1-5, Ryan Stano, reporting for FANSIDED, wrote in an article titled “It’s Official: The Colts are One of the Worst Teams in the NFL,” “They had a chance to make the playoffs with their franchise quarterback back. But not even Andrew Luck can clean this mess up… one thing is for certain. There will be no playoffs for them this year.” As Indiana sports fans, we did what we’ve done so often before and shook our heads and said “next year.” 

But Luck didn’t echo this pessimistic attitude. In his postgame interview after the Jets game, Luck was almost happy. He talked about having fun playing football after having been injured for such a long time and then he talks about improvement: “We need to improve as a team, we need to improve as an offensive unit, we as individuals all need to improve… so that’s what we get back to work on.” He didn’t answer questions about living up to or not living up to expectations, he just told Colts fans that the product needed to be better and then committed to working to be better. 

After that game, things started to take a turn. The Colts steamrolled the Bills in week 7 by a score of 37-5, and then they won four more games in a row to bring their record to 6-5. With a little over a quarter of a season to go, we in Colts nation started to allow a sliver of hope for the season to rise within us. We knew the road ahead would be bumpy and we couldn’t afford many more mistakes if we hoped to reach the postseason, but we were definitely in the hunt.

The next week, we faced the Jacksonville Jaguars, who, at 3-8, we thought we’d beat handily. Instead, in an ugly and still inexplicable game, the Colts lost 6-0, and brought their record back down to .500. It was a demoralizing game; it didn’t end our chances of making the playoffs, but it did feel like all the momentum we’d fought so hard to earn back was being sucked down the drain. We knew we couldn’t lose another game; if we did, the season would be over. The pressure was high; hope was low. 

It was at some point in here that Andrew Luck and his teammates adopted the motto: “We’re going to go 1-0 this week.” For the Colts, most of their season felt like a playoff game because they knew that a loss at any point could sink their ship. But especially in the latter part, after losing to the Jaguars with four games left in the season, every game was a must win. And how did they attack the challenge? They were going to 1-0 that week. It didn’t matter that some of the four teams they were playing were strong teams with all the momentum in the world. It didn’t matter that any playoff games they played would most certainly be on the road. All that mattered was that they analyze the challenges of that week, play better football than the opposition, and get a W. 

And with that motto, the Colts took care of business. They took care of the Texans in week 14, the Cowboys in week 15, and the Giants in week 16 to head into the final match of the season with a 9-6 record, where we won our win or go home game against the (also 9-6) Tennessee Titans to clinch the last playoff spot. The team that started 1-5 finished 9-1, made the playoffs against all odds, and even won a game before being ousted in the divisional round of the playoffs. For his part, Andrew Luck, who had spent the better part of the past two years injured, won the NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award for his performance. 

This isn’t a great feel good story about a team who came from 1-5 to win the Super Bowl, and I could have told that story because it has happened before. But this story, though inconsequential in the grand scheme of sports history, feels more powerful because it doesn’t, much like most things in life, have a storybook ending. It’s not a perfect story, but it is the story of how a team that was down made a decision to win the mental game, put in the work, and as a result accomplished something beyond expectations. 

Sports don’t parallel perfectly to life. I certainly hope you don’t have a win-loss record on your day-to-day life, and the things we pursue often have much greater implications than winning or losing a football game. But there are certainly real comparisons I hope to draw. 

I write a lot of quote essays that center around what I term “the mental game” because I believe that everything we do flows from how we think about life. When our thinking is off, we will not make the most of our lives in front of us. This is a pivotal aspect of our thinking: I imagine we’ve all dug ourselves into some holes and find ourselves in situations we’re less than thrilled with as a result. But when we dig those holes (or fall into them or are tossed into them), you can’t get out all at once. You have to take the steps to climb out foot by foot, and that means living in the moment, going 1-0 each day, each hour, each moment. Only when we win the mental game by devoting our entire focus on what we need to do now, do we give ourselves a fair shot of getting out. When you find yourself living this way and you can’t stop feeling that you are surrendering control, remember that the future is not something you ever could control. 

Sometimes we’ll lose even when the mentality is right. The holes we’re in can get deeper; that may be our fault or it may not be. We all have “games” like the ones the Colts had in Jacksonville where everything that was going right crumbles before our eyes. We wonder if it’s even possible to come back from what we’ve done or what has happened to us. But the call of this essay is simple: whether you’re at a peak of greatness or feeling lower than ever about the prospects of the future, you need to make the most of the moment in front of you. You cannot control tomorrow and you certainly cannot live through tomorrow’s problems today. If you do not have immediate control over it, then it is not worth sacrificing your peace over. 

So Carpe diem. Seize the day. Make all the preparations and work as hard as you must to make sure that you go 1-0 today, and then let tomorrow worry about itself.