Wondering why this didn't get published until nearly three years after the events it describes? Please see here.

I said it was the Bargaining stage, but my wife said it was pure Denial: if Andre Marriner awarded the obvious penalty to Gareth Bale in the 20th minute instead of making an ass of himself (Marriner) for booking him (Bale) for diving, then maybe just maybe Newcastle decide that having the opportunity to play the spoiler against Arsenal gets them fired up enough to at least hold the draw. I mean, Koscielny's goal was pretty ragged, to say the least. A team with something to play for doesn't give that up, do they?

Unfortunately, that's the kind of not-very-rational counterfactual you have to console yourself with when your team has slumped enough through the final two months of the season to find themselves no longer in control of their own destiny. It's painful, but is it surprising? I can't be the only Spurs fan who was hoping against hope that they'd avoid another late-season collapse, while at the same time watching each match with an air of dread, kind of expecting it. Because what had changed to prevent it?

Everything looked so good after Spurs beat Arsenal 2-1 on March 3rd, and then followed it with a total shellacking of Inter Milan, 3-0, on Thursday, March 7th. With ten games to play in the Prem, Spurs sat 3rd, two points ahead of Chelsea and seven ahead of Arsenal. They would be heading back to the San Siro without having given up an away goal. Things were looking good.

Three days later against Liverpool at Anfield, Spurs held a 1-2 lead going into the final quarter of the match. Liverpool looked on the ropes--and then in the 66th minute Kyle Walker got too casual and badly misplayed a backpass(?) to Hugo Lloris, which allowed Stuart Downing to easily steal the ball and beat Vertonghen on the line. (Breathe deep to quell your revulsion, then watch it here.)

Am I the only one who felt it, right then, that feeling of a switch being flipped? One minute, Liverpool are looking like a team beaten, Spurs are 24 minutes from an unbeaten run of 13 matches, including five wins in a row, and then the momentum shifts. As the match progressed, Spurs looked like they might be lucky enough to escape with a draw, but then in the 81st minute Jermaine Defoe made a dreadful backpass, Assou-Ekoto fouled Suarez in the box, and Spurs somehow managed to lose.

From there, the wheels came completely off: four days later at the San Siro, Spurs got totally outplayed and only advanced in extra time off a last minute Adebayor goal to win on away goals. Three days after that, they lost at home 0-1 to 11th-place Fulham. In their next tie in the Europa League, against Basel, they went out on penalties. Their draw against Everton on April 7th dropped them from third in the league to fifth, as both Arsenal and Chelsea passed them.

Going into the last weekend of the season, they'd gone unbeaten in seven, with four wins and three draws, but still trailed Arsenal by one point for the final Champions League spot.

So here they were on the last day needing help from Arsenal/Arsenal's opponent Newcastle to get into the Champions League, save their season, and not lose their best player. Their best hope was to get an early goal to put pressure on Arsenal and perhaps enliven Newcastle. They should have had that chance in the 20th minute, but Marriner shafted them, and after that the team looked subdued for most of the rest of the match. Arsenal scored, and little hope remained. A limping 0-0 draw looked like a real possibility. Then in the 89th minute Gareth Bale uncorked one last amazing goal (doubtless raising his transfer fee by another £5 million in the process) and Spurs finished
the season with a vapid half-triumph. One more collapse, one more fifth-place finish, one more impending loss of their best player.

(Video of Koscielny's goal for Arsenal and Gareth Bale's for Spurs here.)

Repeat a tragedy enough times and it becomes a farce.

But how I was hoping. Spurs played most of the season with a squad containing one-and-a-half strikers (and even that may be giving Adebayor too much credit), a didn't-make-much-sense amalgam of players brought in to fill the hole left by Luka Modric's departure for Real Madrid, and one player whose rise has been so meteoric, I've been continually terrified that one day I'd hear he'd failed a PED test.

If you're an Arsenal fan, Spurs' yearly farce is delicious (read this ESPNFC post to get a feel for the level of gloating we're talking about), but for the rest of us, isn't Spurs-to-the-Champions-League the better story? Getting third or fourth place with a limited, unbalanced squad, keeping the most exciting player in the Prem, finding out what AVB can achieve when he actually stays with a squad for more than one season (which he's never done) and with the greater transfer flexibility afforded by Champions League money and the appeal to outside players looking to join a squad in the ascendancy? If you root for any team besides Arsenal, tell me the truth: would you rather see one-dimensional Theo Walcott against Europe's best, or Gareth Bale? It can't just be Spurs fans who are tired of watching Arsene Wenger scowl on the touchline as his overmatched team--always punching above their weight, but still--crashes out of the Champion's League and finishes the Prem in 4th place.

Yes, I'm a diehard fan, and yes, I'm biased, but Spurs in the Champions League would have been the better story. We've already seen the movie (just last year!) where Spurs finish fifth and lose their best player. But here it is: Hello Europa League for Spurs, Hello Real Madrid for Spurs' Best Player: The Sequel. So sure, I'm making my way through the five stages of grief. But how many stages of boredom are there?

It's not that I can't speak rationally about Tottenham Hotspur. It's just that doing so is like trying to describe a vibrantly colored oil painting in terms of whites, blacks and grays.

For example I could describe Spurs' inability to put Saturday's match away in terms of accumulated fatigue, both long- and short-term. It's a long season, and Spurs played in four different competitions this year (the Premier League, the League Cup, the FA Cup, and the Europa League), only recently got knocked out of the FA Cup, and still are participating in the Premier League (obviously) and the Europa League. Furthermore, before Saturday's game, they played on Wednesday, the previous Sunday, and the Thursday before that. Having watched more high-level soccer than any normal human should, I can assure you that the outlier physical specimens that are professional soccer players still need 96 hours between games to (more or less) fully recover.

So a young team, facing a shocking level of pressure (Spurs haven't won the top level of English football since the '60s), after a ridiculous four matches in ten days, took a one goal lead while playing up a man and somehow let off the intensity a little. Speaking rationally, is that really a surprise?

It isn't. In black and white, clearly that's part of what happened.

But let's bring some color back to the discussion. The other part is that Tottenham Hotspur are cursed.

I awoke Saturday feeling great excitement while trying to ignore an equally great trepidation. That morning, my beloved Tottenham Hotspur were playing their most heated match of the year, the North London derby against their arch-rivals Arsenal. This specific iteration of the derby was arguably the biggest league match between the two teams since the advent of the Premier League. Tottenham started the day in second place in the league, three points behind surprise league-leaders Leicester City. Arsenal sat in third place, three points further behind. No one seems to believe that tiny Leicester can possibly hold on to win the league, so pundits have started saying that this Tottenham team, playing the best football seen from a Spurs side since perhaps the '60s, with the youngest squad in the Premier League, allowing the fewest goals, and holding the best goal differential--these are not the sort of descriptors normally given to Spurs, by the way--should be considered favorites to win the League.

Everyone picking Spurs as favorites to win the Prem clearly hasn't really watched a whole lot of Spurs over the years, and so they're failing to take into account a very important detail. I have, and I know better.

You see, Spurs are cursed.

Here's one example: Spurs went into the final game of the 05-06 season up a point against Arsenal for the final Champions League spot, only to have literally half their squad get violently sick the night before with what was initially reported as food poisoning. They lost their match, Arsenal won theirs, and Spurs ended up in the UEFA Cup.

(The illness turned out to have been caused by a particularly nasty virus, but still, it's fair to call that ridiculously bad luck.)

Here's another: The 2011-2012 Spurs side was in third place for most of the season, but then took a dreadful six points from a possible twenty-seven from late February until late April to fall to fourth--still usually good enough for Champions League football--and then got booted from qualification because stupid Chelsea, outside the top-four in the Premier League that year, won the Champions League. Need I even mention that the third-place team, only one point ahead in the table, was Arsenal?

Here's one more: When a player hasn't scored in a long, long time, a match against Spurs frequently puts an end to that streak. I've lost count of the number of times that an opponent has scored, after which the commentator says something along the lines of, "That's his first Premier League goal in 216 games!"

So when Saturday's pre-match commentary mentioned that Arsenal's Alexis Sanchez hadn't scored since October, a run of eleven straight games, his longest drought since he came to the Premier League, can you understand why my trepidation took on a hue of terror?

But let us not forget that I am a fan of Tottenham Hotspur in the purest sense of the word. Thus while I was desperately afraid, as experience would dictate, I was simultaneously stupidly optimistic, because love makes you stupid.

I watched the match through my fingers. Spurs had all the early possession, but you could clearly see their relative lack of experience. All they could do with their possession was take bad shots and made bad decisions. Everyone wanted to be the hero. Still, they were, for the first part of the game, clearly the better team. I prayed that they'd score and settle down a little.

Predictably, it was Arsenal who scored first. Aaron Ramsey took advantage of some poor defending and put Arsenal ahead in the 39th minute.

Arsenal carried their 1-0 lead into the second half. But then in the 55th minute, Francis Coquelin got a stupid yellow card--his second stupid yellow card--for a reckless, pointless foul on Harry Kane. Match referee Michael Oliver literally shrugged as he pulled the card out his pocket, like What choice do you leave me? And suddenly Spurs were up a man with 35 minutes left to play. And then Toby Alderweireld scored off a corner kick in the 60th minute, and Harry Kane scored a gorgeous goal in the 62nd, curling the ball in from the side of the box, and just like that, Spurs had a 2-1 lead.

And what happened next? Did Spurs, the better team, playing at home, up a goal and a man, with a style based on high pressure and ball possession, take over the game and calmly dispatch the weakened and demoralized Arsenal side? Did they quickly get another goal and put the game away?

Do I really need to answer that?

No, they did not. Instead, I had to watch the sad spectacle of Spurs trying to kill off the clock like there were four minutes left instead of thirty. I watched them waste time, cheaply give possession away, and defend desperately. Anyone who turned on the game during the last twenty-five or so minutes would have been hard pressed to believe that Arsenal were down a man--they had most of the possession and all of the thrust.

And of course--of course!--it was Alexis Sanchez who scored the equalizer in the 77th minute.

It had to be. This is Spurs, after all.

A rational person would tell you that there's no such thing as a curse, that this is the kind of weird confirmation bias that sports fans so regularly participate in. But being a sports fan has nothing to do with rationality. Really. Ask any true fan. If he's being honest, any true fan will tell you that rationality doesn't hold sway because in sports you are dealing with a realm of magic. It is because of the power of this magic that we watch grown adults run around playing what should be children's games, except in front of thousands of people for millions of dollars. We plan our days around watching. We sweat and we scream. Rational? Good god no. But once you have seen that there is magic in the world and it is on display on the sports field, its power can be too much to overcome.

So yes of course Alexis Sanchez scored the equalizer. Only a desperation tackle by Kevin Wimmer against Aaron Ramsey in the final minutes kept Spurs from losing the game outright. And thus Spurs squandered yet another chance. Of course they did. It had to be that way.

So now will I finally do the rational thing and pull my energy away from this fruitless endeavor? Will I watch only idly for the rest of the season instead of opening my heart and pouring myself into something over which I have no control? Of course not. This is not the realm of rationality. This is the realm of magic and of love, and in the face of such forces I am powerless.