A study of the fantasies we use to make sense of reality.
Fantasy
Loneliness
Football
The shirt
Nobody daydreams about what they already have. A fantasy is a map of what is missing, and very often what is missing is a witness. A little boy tells his mother that one day he will go to the moon, and she answers with a joke at his expense. So the dream grows, bigger every year, as if the right height might finally earn her attention. Most of our grandest ambitions begin this way, as a small request to be seen. Underneath the rocket is a child still waiting for someone to say, I believe you.
Maybe because reality doesn't always give us what we need.
LET'S GOOOO
who is the man next to me screaming in my ear
that's me lol. we're family now
ok family. same seats next week?
3 hours ago we didn't know each other
number 2 is HIM
love y'all fr
We put pieces of ourselves into things larger than us. A team, a jersey, a name stitched across the back of a shirt. Two strangers can share nothing at all until they learn they love the same team, and for three hours on a Sunday they are family.
Fantasy hands us what the week withheld. Belonging, a little hope, a reason to stand up and shout with someone.
Sometimes the thing that connects us is the same thing that sets us apart. In Remember the Titans, Sheryl Yoast knows the playbook better than half the boys on the sideline. Football is how she belongs, the language she shares with her father. But in 1971 a girl who loved the game was a curiosity, not a teammate. The sideline belonged to men, and a girl was expected to cheer from the stands, not call the play. She was surrounded by football and still alone in it, the only one who loved it the way she did, in a place the world kept telling her was not hers.
She was right where she belonged, and the world kept telling her she wasn't.
A boy rehearses in a small house in Gary, Indiana, until every step is exact, while his father watches from the doorway. The world would come to know the son by his first name alone. It is fair to wonder whether the dream that made him was his before it was his father's.
Some fantasies are handed to us before we are old enough to choose them.
Was that Michael's dream, or Joe's dream for Michael?
The star, the body, the car, the woman arranged on a screen that already knows our name, there to be looked at and never known. None of it arrives by accident. Someone decided what we would desire long before we decided to desire it.
Frank Ocean sang about living inside an idea that came from another man's mind. It is hard to hear that now without counting how many of ours arrived the same way.
How much of what we fantasize about actually belongs to us?
you are the reason we lost. all of it
worst player in the league and it's not even close
you should be embarrassed to wear that jersey
my son cried tonight because of you. hope you're proud
they should cut you before you get home. fraud
nobody believed in you. you just proved us right
i hope you never play again
proud of you no matter what. call me when you can
Then the pass falls incomplete. The fan who adored him at kickoff is typing something cruel by the fourth quarter, and every message lands on a phone held by a real person sitting in a quiet locker room.
There is always somebody underneath the fantasy. Somebody else's fantasy is somebody else's reality.
Fantasy football is the plainest version of it. A man can name the third-string quarterback on his favorite team and still forget his own anniversary. The world we imagined gets our sharpest attention, and the real one gets whatever is left.
We write the night before it happens, and then we hold the real person to the script. Dreaming was never the trouble. The trouble starts when fantasy stops being a place we escape to and becomes something we expect other people to fulfill for us.
The partner who must be perfect. The player who must never miss. The stranger who must turn out to be exactly who we imagined.
Nobody owes us our fantasy.
Take away the jersey, the screen and the crowd, and what remains is simple. Most of us are reaching for something reality has not given us yet, and most of us are reaching alone.
The front admits what the back was waiting to hear.
Drag to turn it
Fantasy as a reason to keep going. He imagines the champion before he becomes one.
Sheryl Yoast, the coach's daughter who loved the game more than anyone around her. Played by Hayden Panettiere, who died in August 2026.
A whole life built inside someone else's idea of it.
The quiet man and the extraordinary one he becomes whenever reality goes still.
The life we imagined set beside the life we actually live.
Living inside an idea from another mind. It also plays fourth on the I Get Lonely 2 playlist.
A father's ambition and a son's gift, and the question of where one ended and the other began.
The billboards know his name before he says a word, and each one already knows what he should want.
A boy reaching for the moon because no one at home would clap for him.
The night he imagined and the night he got, playing side by side.