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Dream Ending

 Nice essay about sports parents which easily transcends sports. Of the second death died by a sports parents, the author says:

..the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.

That purgatorial purposelessness is the fate of any and all parents who wrap up their hopes and dreams into the lives of their children - see parenting as an act of sacrifice where nothing is too much as long as the kid wins big. The field where this win needs to be delivered could be baseball, business or something else. It is where the parent's own hopes for grand success had been belied. 

The way the child asks out of living the parent's dream is also typical and mirror's the author's experience:

“I’m going to think about it.” Think about it? For me, this was the same as a girlfriend saying, “We need to talk.”Only later did I realize that those words were the first move in a careful choreography. My son wanted to quit, but in a way that would not break my heart. He also didn’t want me to rant and rave and try to talk him out of it. We had reversed roles. He was the adult. I was the child.

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