Indiana

I sat in Crisler for a while afterwards. The only time I've sat longer in a sports venue was my senior year, when we lost to Ohio State in my last ever game. On the drive home from Ann Arbor, I started to think that it was me, rather than Michigan sports, that was causing this depression. I started to wonder whether the two were discernible. It seemed very real that the worst losses of the past year - Bama, this Indiana game - coincidentally synchronized with my worst nights. It didn't matter which it was, though. This was my worst-ever night.

"Home to Villa in the League Cup quarter-final replay was probably my worst-ever night, a new low on a relationship already studded with them. …

Part of it was my own latent depression permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that the things did not stay bad forever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn't ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper, and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and this miserable half-life, forever."

- Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch