League of Legends: tales of nostalgia and youth watching the 2014 World Championship
Even by today’s standards – having been there and done that – the 2014 League of Legends World Championship experience still feels surreal.
We do some crazy things in college. For instance, this one time I stayed up until 6 AM to watch the League of Legends World Championship. Four days in a row.
The year was 2014 – a good year, by most accounts – and myself, Steven Byers and Tim Fingerle were living together in a suite at Valparaiso University. I had been playing League of Legends since Freshman year, often using the game as a means to stay connected to friends back home. As I began to find kindred souls at the college, I got them into League as well, and all of us would queue up for full five-man comps.
We weren’t particularly good, and we would occasionally resort to bellowing across the hall to one another like the sweat-dappled man-children we were, and for every Baron stolen by a Xerath ultimate, there was another post-midnight falling-out after our fifth straight loss.
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But it was a good, strange, valuable part of my life – one that I wouldn’t trade for all the frat parties. Which is not to say I have any problem with frat parties.
I’ve written before about moments frozen in time, and 2014 exists in my mind in the same territory. I was living in extremely close proximity to people I had only met a few short months before – all while traversing a strange bridge between childhood and adulthood, punctuated by overwhelming anxiety, close friendships and many games of League of Legends.
I glided through classes, attended my first real parties, and fought the pervading feeling that I was out on the moon, living many states away from my native New York and the people I had grown up with. It’s a strange feeling being homesick for a place you decided to leave – the sort of sensation that makes you begin to think you made a terrible mistake somewhere down the line.
Which is not to say I had a bad time in college. Even beyond the “formative” experiences – which is often a way to sugarcoat those moments of true misery – I had some of my best times during those years.
Yet there was an acute sense of dislocation, of being very far from home, when I would wake up to the sound of tennis racquets below my window, train whistles drifting across the campus and midnight drunkards slouching their way back to their dorms. Even by today’s standards – having been there and done that – this whole experience still feels surreal.
In that sense, League was a sort of equalizer.