My palms are sweating profusely and there is sweat dripping down my hair and onto the dirty floor. I can feel the gold medal in my hands that I have been waiting on my whole life. The red, white, and blue lanyard rubbing against my neck and the gold medal heavy on my chest, weighing it down. The final whistle of the weekend summoned for our opponent to serve, and I was dragged out of my daydream. My heart rate increases with every movement the girl makes on the opposite side of the net. Looking around at the worried faces of my teammates, I realize this is not how the weekend is supposed to end. We are supposed to be the team standing on the podium with big smiles spread like peanut butter on our faces. The serve seems to come in fast forward, and I watch as it drops to the floor followed by my teammate who desperately flings an arm out. My shoulders fall as a wave of understanding hits me. My daydream was crushed in a split second, that split second was the anxiousness of my whole team. This moment is the moment where we were the most scared in our lives.

The girl sitting behind the score flipped it so the score for the other team read 15. That girl didn’t even care who won; she didn’t want anything more than to get out of the gym. I, on the other hand fell to the to the ground out of pure disappointment and anger. The tears were instantly released and a knot grew big in my throat. Prying myself off the floor was like peeling off a Band-Aid off your skin that has been there for weeks, hard and painful.

I always tell my teammates to be good sports and look people in the eye when you say good game even if it is the hardest thing they’ve ever had to do. In this moment, when it was my turn to be a good sport, I broke down. All my morals flew outside of that gym. My eyes followed the floor as my hands barely graced my opponents. The words “good game” came out as a mumbled lie. I was ashamed of myself; for losing, for not being a good sport, and for being so dramatic about this whole thing.

Not once can we get first place in a tournament, its always second in gold, always. With this thought, my shoulders start to rise with hiccups and it is hard to breathe in between the sobs. “USA South 14 purple for 1st place in the 14’s gold division.” As this is announced and the team is being presented with their medals that should be around our necks, I face the other way, clamp my hands over my ears, and sob.

My team is called next and I can barely walk onstage because my eyesight is blurred. The photographer takes a picture and the majority of my team looks like we’re being tortured. What I learned as I walked out of that gym that evening was that I would never let myself feel that disappointment again.

In this moment, feeling all the negative energy around me, I realize that I am lucky. While my friend is at home crying about her mom who is sick with cancer, I’m crying over a stupid game that won’t matter years from now. It won’t even matter a couple days from this moment. Some people are standing over the grave of a loved one and I’m sitting in front of my friends and family who are happy that I have a medal around my neck, but all I want to do is rip it off. People have no money and no shoes and no place to stay. I bet they would give anything to be in my position, as sad as I am. What I should be focusing all my attention to is helping others. It’s okay to feel sorry for yourself sometimes, its okay to want. I wanted to feel the weight of the gold medal, not the silver. I have been committed to working on getting to this day, and now it’s down the drain. But more than that, my morals went down the drain along with the game that day. That is why I never want to feel that disappointment, that shame in myself ever again.