The Team You Grow Up With

Childhood, Memory, and Why Certain Franchises Stay With Us

A child sits on the living room floor while a game plays in the background. The commentary blends with the noise of the house. Someone reacts to a missed shot. Someone else complains about the referees. The child does not yet understand the standings, the roster construction, or the strategic arguments that animate adult fans. What they learn instead is simpler and deeper.

They learn who “we” are.

Years later the details sharpen — the players, the rivalries, the seasons that mattered — but the basic orientation often remains intact. The team becomes part of how time is remembered. Certain years are recalled through playoff runs, particular apartments through the games watched inside them, childhood friendships through the jerseys that defined the era.

The strange durability of this attachment begins to make sense when we think about identity not as something fixed inside us, but as something formed through memory and story. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur described identity in exactly this way through his concept of narrative identityNarrative identity is Ricoeur’s idea that a person’s sense of self is formed not by a fixed inner core but by the ongoing story they construct from their experiences over time. . A life holds together not because every moment is identical to the last, but because the events of a life are interpreted as part of a continuous narrative.

In that sense, growing up with a basketball team is less like choosing a product and more like inheriting a storyline.

How Stories Hold Identity Together

Ricoeur argued that a person becomes intelligible to themselves by weaving experiences into a narrative that connects past, present, and future. The self is not a static object that persists unchanged. Instead, it is something that emerges through the interpretation of memory.

Basketball fandom fits this structure remarkably well. The fan does not merely remember isolated games. They remember eras.

A childhood might be remembered as “the Jordan years,” or “the rebuilding seasons,” or “the time we finally made the playoffs again.” The team becomes a framework through which life events are organized. Seasons mark time. Players define phases of life. Victories and collapses become shared reference points that stretch across decades.

What makes this powerful is that the story is never purely private. Families, cities, and media repeat the same moments until they become collective memory. The result is that the fan’s personal memories slowly merge with a much larger narrative.

By the time a fan reaches adulthood, loyalty can feel almost self‑evident, as though it had always been there.

Habit Before Belief

Much of this identity forms long before reflection enters the picture.

Aristotle once observed that character develops through habit. We become a certain kind of person by repeatedly performing certain actions. Something similar happens in sports fandom. Children watch games every week. They learn the colors, the rivalries, the emotional rhythms of winning and losing.

At first these are just routines. But over time the repetition creates a disposition. Supporting the team begins to feel natural.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call this a habitusHabitus is Bourdieu’s term for the deeply ingrained habits, dispositions, and tastes that are formed through repeated experience and that guide behavior without conscious deliberation. — a set of ingrained tendencies that shape how a person moves through the world without requiring conscious deliberation. In the context of basketball, it means that cheering for one team and resenting another can feel almost instinctive, even though those reactions were slowly learned through years of repetition.

The important point is that belief often arrives after the habit has already taken root. By the time a fan begins to explain why they care about a franchise, the attachment has usually been developing for years.

Dynasties and the Structure of Childhood

Consider what it meant to grow up during the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s.

For children watching basketball at the time, the Bulls were not just a successful team. They were a recurring presence at the end of every season. Michael Jordan, the red jerseys, and the June Finals broadcasts formed a predictable rhythm in the calendar.

Between 1991 and 1998 Chicago won six championships, organized into two separate three‑peats. For a young fan this did not feel like a collection of isolated triumphs. It felt like an era. Childhood itself could become structured around the expectation that the Bulls would matter when the season reached its final weeks.

From Ricoeur’s perspective, what mattered was not simply the victories but the way those victories supplied a long narrative arc. A fan growing up in that period could easily place their own memories inside the larger storyline of the dynasty. The team’s history provided the plot into which personal experience could be inserted.

The result was an identity anchored not in a single moment but in a sustained narrative.

When One Event Rewrites the Past

Sometimes a single season reorganizes decades of memory.

Cleveland experienced this in the 2016 NBA Finals. After falling behind the Golden State Warriors three games to one, the Cavaliers completed a comeback that culminated in a 93–89 Game 7 victory and the franchise’s first championship. For the city it ended a fifty‑two‑year drought without a major professional sports title.

The importance of that moment cannot be explained only by the game itself. Its deeper significance lies in how it transformed the meaning of everything that came before it.

Years of disappointment, near misses, and civic frustration were suddenly interpreted differently. What had once felt like a history of failure could now be remembered as a long prelude to eventual redemption.

Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity helps clarify why events like this resonate so strongly. A new chapter in a story does not simply add information. It can reshape the interpretation of earlier chapters. The past remains the same in terms of facts, but its meaning shifts once the narrative takes a new direction.

For Cleveland fans, the 2016 title did exactly that. It reorganized memory.

Loyalty Through Lean Years

If championships can reshape a story, losing seasons can deepen it.

The Sacramento Kings spent sixteen consecutive seasons outside the playoffs before finally returning in 2023 with a 48–34 record. During that stretch the fan base developed a reputation for persistence. The arrival of the “Light the Beam” ritual during the successful 2022–23 season gave supporters a new symbol through which that persistence could be celebrated.

What makes the Kings an interesting case is that the identity of the fan base did not dissolve during the losing years. If anything, the drought intensified the narrative.

Fans continued to watch, to discuss prospects, to attend games, and to pass along stories about earlier eras of the franchise. The habits never disappeared, and those habits sustained a sense of belonging even when victories were scarce.

This is where collective memory becomes important. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory operates within social frameworks — what he called collective memoryCollective memory is Halbwachs’s concept that memories are not purely individual but are shaped, maintained, and reinforced by the social groups to which a person belongs. . People remember not only as individuals but as members of groups who reinforce which events matter.

In Sacramento, the long drought became one of those shared memories. Loyalty itself became part of the story fans told about who they were.

Inheriting a Tradition

Some franchises demonstrate another dimension of identity formation: the inheritance of memory from previous generations.

The Boston Celtics provide a clear example. When Boston won its eighteenth championship in 2024, the victory added another banner to a history already filled with legendary figures and celebrated eras. A young Celtics fan does not begin with a blank slate. They inherit a narrative that includes Bill Russell’s championships, Larry Bird’s battles with the Lakers, and decades of rivalry and expectation.

In this sense, personal memory enters a story that was already underway.

Alasdair MacIntyre once suggested that individual lives make sense only within traditionsIn MacIntyre’s philosophy, a tradition is a living, evolving practice with its own internal standards of excellence, shared history, and ongoing arguments about what matters most. — larger social practices that provide standards, goals, and shared histories. A Celtics fan growing up in Boston enters exactly such a tradition. The meaning of loyalty is partly defined by the stories that precede them.

Over time those inherited stories merge with personal experience, and the fan begins to treat the collective past as part of their own identity.

The Quiet Formation of “We”

What begins as background noise in childhood can eventually become a defining feature of how someone understands themselves.

Years of watching games, hearing family members recount past seasons, and absorbing the emotional vocabulary of fandom slowly build a sense of belonging. The word “we” begins to feel natural: we lost that series, we drafted that player, we finally won the title.

From a purely logical standpoint the pronoun makes little sense. Fans do not play the games.

But identity rarely follows strict logic. It follows narrative.

And the team someone grows up with often becomes one of the most durable stories through which that narrative is told.

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Footnotes / Philosophy Terms

1. Narrative identity ↩

Narrative identity is Ricoeur’s idea that a person’s sense of self is formed not by a fixed inner core but by the ongoing story they construct from their experiences over time.

2. Habitus ↩

Habitus is Bourdieu’s term for the deeply ingrained habits, dispositions, and tastes that are formed through repeated experience and that guide behavior without conscious deliberation.

3. Collective memory ↩

Collective memory is Halbwachs’s concept that memories are not purely individual but are shaped, maintained, and reinforced by the social groups to which a person belongs.

4. Traditions ↩

In MacIntyre’s philosophy, a tradition is a living, evolving practice with its own internal standards of excellence, shared history, and ongoing arguments about what matters most.