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Editor’s Note: This is Part 4 of a five-part series on what it means to be a D.C. sports fan in 2026. СÂÜÀòÓ°ÊÓ’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of fans — die-hards, casuals, transplants and people who barely watch — about how they follow their teams, what it costs them and what keeps them coming back. Some of what they said was about coverage. Most of it wasn’t. Read all five parts and learn more about how this series was reported. 

This episode could read as a setup for a punchline at the expense of the good folks who took the time to talk to me for this project — catch them being phony, point, laugh.

That’s not what this is. Everyone I spoke to, from the man on the street to the little sister I grew up with, was straight up authentic.

And, interestingly, I found many elements of my own journey in sports fandom.

I didn’t get D.C. sports as an inheritance like Danny Jolles did. I wasn’t born here and my dad wasn’t much of a sports fan. But I found this passion at 12 years old and it ran deep enough to steer a huge part of my career.

And having a career in sports reporting has shifted what was a die-hard D.C. sports fan into more of an observer whose interest lies more in telling great stories than in any singular outcome. Truthfully, even if I hadn’t landed here, my relationship with sports would probably look more like Javon’s.

‘Are they still terrible?’

I haven’t seen Javon since we worked together at a local sports talk radio station in the early 2000s. He’s no longer in sports talk and he cites factors such as the NFL’s handling of Colin Kaepernick, and the commodification of sports (which we touched on in Part 3 of this series) as to why he’s transitioned from a die-hard sports fan to a more casual consumer.

“Sports used to be a necessity and a way of life. Now it’s an escape, and one of the elements where I get a little bit of joy.”

A tidy story about a man who moved on and not a bitter one. Then I asked how he actually keeps up with his teams:

“When your team is bad, you just sort of check in: are they still terrible? OK, they’re still terrible.”

That is not how a man who moved on behaves. That’s a guy still phoning the hospital for updates on a patient he swears he stopped visiting.

The connoisseur who skims

You remember Ricardo, who follows his Carolina teams from up here and reads about them constantly. Ask him what he wants from coverage and he’ll describe a connoisseur we met earlier this week: the deep dive, the breakdown, the kind of analysis a box score can’t touch. “I love the dive into the games,” he told me. And then, a breath later, the other Ricardo showed up:

“I’m a skimmer. Get my attention from the get-go.”

The instant a piece slows down — the instant it starts reaching for filler to stretch to a commercial — he’s gone, thumb already moving to the next thing. So which is he, the diver or the skimmer?

Both, of course. He wants the depth of a documentary delivered at the speed of a highlight. He isn’t confused about what he likes. He’d just never had to hold the two halves of it up next to each other until somebody asked.

The proud fair-weather fan

Lisa, a schoolteacher and a D.C. native, doesn’t bother with the costume at all. She’ll tell you exactly what kind of fan she is:

“I’m a fair weather fan — if a D.C. team is winning, I’m out there. I went to the Nats parade.”

No defensiveness, no little speech about how she’s secretly been there through the lean years. The Caps win a Cup, she’s in. The Nats win it all, she’s at the parade. The teams slide back into the standings and she’s got other things going on.

We’ve built a whole vocabulary for fans like Lisa — bandwagoner, front-runner, fair-weather — and we swing it like an insult. She just nods and picks her sign back up. No costume to keep straight.

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The nonfan with a back door

And then there’s Priscilla, who would object to being in this story at all — because she’ll tell you (and does tell me, regularly) that she doesn’t follow D.C. sports. Not a fan. Not her thing. Except:

“I don’t feel any connection to D.C. sports except through you.”

The “you” is me; we’ve been friends since we were 12 years old. And that turns out to be the entire on-ramp.

She couldn’t find the Wizards in the standings, but send her a story — this player came from nothing, this team’s a long shot — and she’s all the way in. Her fandom doesn’t run through the teams. It runs through the people who hand her the teams. Which sounds like the opposite of a sports fan, right up until you notice it might be the most common kind there is.

The ‘chill base’

The aforementioned Danny Jolles has a theory about D.C. sports fans he means as a compliment.

We’re “a chill base,” he said — a fanbase that takes its losing gracefully:

“The Wizards stink, we all just went, ‘All right, have a good season, see you next year.’ We understood the assignment.”

He likes this about us. He’ll defend it. In his telling, it’s practically a civic virtue — proof that D.C. keeps its perspective while other cities lose their minds:

“Every athlete should want to play in Washington, D.C., because you won’t get booed.”

It’s a lovely self-portrait compared with, say, Philadelphia.

Also, if you’ve been faithfully reading this series, it’s not quite who we are.

Because this same series is full of D.C. fans who are anything but chill. Andrew B. wants a broadcaster willing to call the Wizards what they are: the die-hards who’ve been keeping a ledger of every heartbreak for decades and the ones still mad about a name change.

Danny describes a city at peace with losing from inside a project full of people who very much are not. He’s sure he knows exactly what kind of fan this city contains. He’s just as sure about himself — and that’s where he turns out to be onto something.

At both ends of the gulf …

Here’s the surprisingly common thread I found across these interviews: despite the gulf between non-sports fans and die-hards, at their core they both want the same thing.

Danny ran a sports podcast for a while — Everything But the Scores — and the name was the whole thesis. What he noticed was that the people who loved it weren’t all sports fans:

“The average person does not care about the defense the Commanders are planning to run … but the average person wants to hear about Jayden Daniels’ family and why he’s here … about Bobby Wagner and his journey. The average person just wants to hear about the stories.”

That’s the loudest die-hard in this series — the man who’ll root for a D.C. team that doesn’t even exist yet — telling you the games aren’t always the point.

And then, from the other side of the gulf, the person who proves him right. My sister Lauren — who has about as little use for sports as anyone I talked to:

“I’m more interested in the people more than the sports.”

She’s describing, without realizing it, the exact thing Danny and every die-hard in this series also kept circling back to — not the result, the human being inside it.

And Lisa, the fair-weather fan from a few paragraphs back, saw the whole size of it the year sports briefly went away during the COVID shutdown. She came across a podcast about what that absence was doing to people:

“The loss that so many men felt — it really showed me … this is really a huge part of people’s being.”

Neither Lisa nor Lauren lives and dies with a team, but both saw the size of the thing clearly.

In this episode, maybe the biggest surprise wasn’t discovering that people had misjudged themselves. It was discovering that fandom is less a fixed identity than a series of changing relationships — with teams, with family, with time and with each other.

Which leads us to the series finale. After four days of talking about time, money, habits and identity, one question remained: What does sports give us that nothing else does?

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