BlueandGoldnews.net WVU basketball coach Darian DeVries gives instructions from the sidelines.

MORGANTOWN — Sometimes you need days like Monday.

Quiet days. No fast breaks or fumbles. No endless screeching of an official’s whistle or a yellow hanky laying on a frozen football field. No wins or losses, no cheerleaders or tear feeders.

The Coliseum is a wonderful place when it’s crammed to the rafters with fanatics awaiting the final buzzer and the echo of the crack a musket signifying an upset of the nation’s No. 2 team, but there are times when an empty arena offers up the sounds of silence that Simon and Garfunkel immortalized in the movie “The Graduate.”

Wikipedia describes the culture of Mondays this way:

“A number of popular songs in Western culture portray Mondays often as days of depression, anxiety, avolition, hysteria, or melancholy (mostly because of its association with the first day of the workweek). Mondays are also portrayed as days of boredom and bad luck, especially for many people in their school years, who have to go back to school every Monday after having no school on Saturday and Sunday, which can make them grow a hatred for Mondays. For example, “Monday, Monday” (1966) from the Mamas & the Papas; “Rainy Days and Mondays” (1971) from the Carpenters; Monday, Monday, Monday (2002) from Tegan and Sara; and “Manic Monday” (1986) from the Bangles (written by Prince).

It is not coincidental that as this is being cranked out, The Carpenters are on YouTube singing “Rain Days and Mondays” right after Fats Domino pounded out “Blue Monday”, but that’s just how this Monday has felt awaiting return phone calls that probably won’t come until Tuesday or Wednesday.

So, this is a Monday to do some thinking and quickly it hits you that thinking isn’t all that bad, even in a culture that is coming to worship artificial intelligence over just living within one’s own mind.

Yet, here we are understanding that reflection is often for more than just mirrors or a still, quiet lake on a sunshine-filled morning.

It’s a Monday to think about, of all things, losing, for even though there is no game to play, there have been games played over the weekend and as happy an ending as there was for the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, this was a day to think about losing and what it really is.

After all, both the West Virginia men’s and women’s basketball teams had been upset over the weekend and the fans of the Buffalo Bills and the Washington Commanders once again found themselves on the wrong end of games that could have sent them to the Super Bowl.

Toss in the memories of last basketball season for the West Virginia men and the last football season and the fact that WVU has never won a men’s basketball or football national championship and the changes that have come to the sport make it look like the rules that are governing college sports today have, if anything, made it seem like even more of a challenge to get there.

I can’t really appreciate what a fan goes through, for as a sports journalist I long ago took an oath to remain uninvolved in the outcome. Win or lose you have to write about it and you do so from a distance that a fan can’t appreciate, just as it is hard from that distance to appreciate what the fan is going through.

You think about the dreams that 10-year-olds cling to and with the frustration of the 50-year-old fan, yet you know that it really is all a diversion, for whether a team wins or loses is not a value judgment.

You learn it as a sports journalist up close having covered an Atlanta Falcons team that won one game in an entire NFL season; by covering a Pittsburgh Pirates’ team that lost 104 games in another.

At the other end of the spectrum is to cover the Cincinnati Reds through the Big Red Machine years or to watch the Pirates rise from that 104-loss season to become the Leyland-Bonds-Bonilla Pirates of the 1990s, who offered both ends of the spectrum but were playing the role of the Bills or Commanders by losing to the Atlanta Braves and failing to reach the World Series.

You know the hurt they felt, maybe Buffalo more than any others for they have four Super Bowl appearances and four defeats in addition to the last three AFC Championship losses, but you also know that win or lose, the players who went into those games came out the same person and that maybe the fans carried the losses far longer than the players themselves.

What does it all mean? Difficult to answer, even in the midst of a day of reflection, for the love/hate affairs we have with our teams is far more complex than win and losses.

Wins matter, yes, but I’ve seen fans stop going to games because the bathrooms were dirty or the beer was too expensive than because of the team’s failure to win games.

Each game offers a new world, a new reason for being there. It is a rebirth for the team and for the fans, an adventure which begins at 0-0 and can take you as either a player or fan in any of 100 directions.

Yes, winning is better than losing, but what really seems to matter is the experience itself, being part of something special .. From the singing of the National Anthem to the singing for “Country Roads”, rooting for your favorite player or being that player being rooted for, from watching yourself on a video screen, either trying to grab a pepperoni roll or pass from the quarterback.

And so it goes on a reflective Monday, Sinatra fitting crooning “Young at Heart” in the background and wondering when or if the calls will be returned, but feeling fulfilled because you know that the games start up again soon for a couple of hours we all can immerse ourselves in the Wonderland of sports.