The asterisk

I’m a sports fan, which means I have no life. I like to watch attractive people do things at a level I can only dream of while making a ton of money. Still, I like to think most sports fans will know what I mean when I say “asterisk.” Wikipedia defines it as something “attached to a sporting record,” indicating that it’s “tainted.” It’s when you read a list and an entry has an asterisk on it, accompanied by an explanation in the footnotes. It works as a matter of historical record, so that future generations and people who were not privy to the details of a situation understand that there were extenuating circumstances surrounding a season, an achievement, or a record. It’s like a caveat, a footnote on a season and on whatever a team accomplished in it. More informally, though, the point of the asterisk is to acknowledge that, in a season, teams won and teams lost, but also that they “won” and they “lost.” When a season has on asterisk on it, issues arise in try-ing to compare moments from that season to those in prior seasons.

A season or a championship win can now be asterisked for all sorts of reasons. Some people put an asterisk on the Toronto Raptors’ (basketball, for the less inclined) win last year, a win that oc-curred against a depleted Golden State Warriors team with no Kevin Durant—arguably their best player—no Klay Thompson, and several other players who had played an extremely high number of games every year prior for several seasons. Recent controversy in MLB has also asterisked one World Series championship. Years after winning the Major League Baseball World Series in 2017, the Houston Astros were revealed to have illicitly stolen signs, revealing the kinds of pitches that were about to be thrown and relaying it to their batters for an unfair advantage. Even more people will be tempted to put on asterisk on the eventual winner of the current NBA and NHL bubble playoffs, as this season has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandem-ic. Asterisking has evolved past mere footnotes; proponents of asterisking believe it ensures fair-ness. Presented with objective evaluations of failure and accomplishment, for them, it makes far more sense to subjectively decide which ones mean a little less.

Apologies to everyone for the sports talk. Point is, I’ve been thinking about the asterisk in rela-tion to school. I’m going into my final year at the University of Toronto, and it’s been hard not to think about it in every which way. This was supposed to be my championship year, like when a team acquires all the pieces, they think they need to win and finally go “all in.” Like it or not, the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has and will affect several things about my final year, and I’m not alone. As an academic year, 2020/2021 will be jarring for every student at the University of To-ronto, whether it’s their first or their last. Classes are incredibly different, assignments and evalu-ations have changed. How we interact and engage with our classmates, teachers/TAs, and class material has also been affected. Even outside of that, it is now far easier to get distracted by…well, distractions—my bed for one, rampant social and political unrest another, more press-ing diversion. Some people—and I hope it’s obvious that I consider myself one of these unfortu-nate people—will struggle with these new changes to school. But some might thrive and excel. To some, these changes to life, to school life, and to classes will be academically beneficial. I’m happy for these people. I’m glad someone’s thriving during this difficult and confusing time.

So why the asterisk? While some are having an easier time than others, we’re all still competing. Competing for grades, competing for positions in our respective POSts, competing for references from professors, competing for internships and jobs. Asterisking 2020 won’t stop some from suc-ceeding more than others, but it might make us feel better about it. You see the temptation.

That’s generally the point of asterisking; it doesn’t really change what happens or what happened. Asterisking is a product of our hyper-competitive, achievement-driven society—and by society, I do mean outside of UofT (even if UofT does perfectly fit the description). We asterisk a year because we want to believe in our potential—to accomplish, to achieve, and to win, especially when compared to others. One might unconsciously asterisk a year of bad grades because of inju-ry and health issues, or because of personal tragedy or a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, but what would be the point? People asterisk because they’re eager to be fair, but they forget that competition is rarely as fair as we make it out to be. Quite a number of years in quite a number of sports could be asterisked because something always happens; sports and competition don’t exist in vacuums. And that problem is far more significant in life.

It’s the problem with these sports analogies. Life is like sports in a lot of ways, but it isn’t a sport. This thing we’re all doing is not a game. And while we don’t all make asinine sports analogies, so much of society is achievement-obsessed and accomplishment-driven, including university stu-dents. We’re achievement-obsessed, so we confuse not winning or not winning yet with losing. There will be moments I flounder this year, and some of those moments will be due to the very chaotic moment the world is in. But I flounder, as most people do. I floundered in moments in past years also—some of those were extenuating circumstances, but nonetheless, I did. I’m going to graduate in 2021 with a lower GPA than I would’ve liked and with a weaker resume than I would’ve liked, but I have to resist the urge to asterisk because I have to resist the urge to turn this into a sport, into some game that I’ve lost or that I’m losing. Life is already too competi-tive.

If there is a contest life resembles closely, it’s a marathon, not the NBA. We enter to prove some-thing to ourselves about what we can achieve, not to compete against others. We enter to run, to overcome obstacles, internal and external. We enter to cross the finish line; we set expectations for ourselves and then we work to surpass those, whether it happens in this marathon or the next (if you’re a masochist). And the worst thing you can do in a marathon is focus on the race every-one else is running. My four years at university might not reach the lofty expectations that I (and my parents) had, but that doesn’t make me a failure or a loser. Sure, it hurts when people dart past us while we struggle, but for us, it still has to be about crossing that finish line. Us and our own journeys. By the time they’re over, my four years at university will have been a lot of things, but the most important is that they’ll have been mine. Asterisking only matters when you got bogged down in everyone else’s race. The institutions of life—jobs, grad school, internships—might not care about all this mumbo-jumbo I’m preaching, but that shouldn’t change how I see the race. That’s the one good thing about a marathon: as long as you keep moving, you’ll get where you’re trying to go eventually.