New Year, New Resolutions

In another life, I was lucky to work for a fitness company, helping them build out their online presence into the behemoth unicorn they are today. I won’t name names, but they rhymed with, uh… Peachbody. One of their most popular trainers, er… Pony Morton… was the creator of a still-bestselling program called, erm… B90X.

Anyway, T… er, Pony often made light of the fact that his program was exercise’s version of a Christmas album. Once a year, sure as anything, people were lining up to drop big bucks on his workout program. Peachbody couldn’t hardly sell a copy between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when everyone has a month filled with turkey, gravy, and several pounds of sugar. Their selling season had nothing to do with the rest of retail.

But New Year’s Day… oh, New Year’s Day the digital and physical copies literally flew off the shelves, and kept on going for a good month or two after. A New Year invariably brings new sensibilities, new commitments, and new resolutions, even when the DVD never ends up coming out of the wrapper. In those days, Peachbody’s qualitative feedback showed that over 50% of their physical New Year’s orders never saw their way out of the shrink wrap, as sad as that number proves to be. While that number originally tracked its way to digital, who knows how many now buy a yearly subscription and never log in?

Staring that sad data in the face, I found myself giving up on New Year’s resolutions specifically, and ended up making resolutions when I knew the urge/inspiration to change whatever habit I wanted to change was the strongest. That method was more successful for me than waiting for a specific day out of every 365 to roll back around. Only marginally more successful, but hey…

This New Year proved to be a bit more of an inspiration, if only in how impactful some of the last days of last year and the first days of this year were. Piling on top of all of those sensibilities was the hushed and somber moment during the most-recent Monday Night Football game when Buffalo Bills cornerback Damar Hamlin fell unconscious from cardiac arrest on the field after what looked a fairly innocuous hit. The sense of things more important than sport fell quickly over the teams, coaches, announcers, fans, and eventually even the league to simply do what was right. To resolve that something was more important than a game they had initially deemed wildly so. Some things just matter more than a billion dollar game. The currently-7-million-dollar-and-still-going-strong outpouring of grassroots financial love to Hamlin’s fundraising efforts was the cherry on top of that inspiration sundae.

It’s a New Year for all of us, even those of us already partway through our seasons. Here are a few resolutions that might just make every Denver sports fan a little happier.

Here’s hoping the Denver Broncos resolve to get a full-time coach that can bring at least the calm, direction, and resolve that Jerry Rosburg was able to bring to the team over the last week-plus, even if they do something not-so-crazy and just give the job to Jerry. A resolution to simply get their ducks in a row that way might go a long way to turning their 2023 in a different direction. A team that lost that many games by that few a points doesn’t need as big a nudge as you might think, and an inspired performance against the Kansas City Chiefs showed as much.

Maybe a resolution for the Denver Nuggets to go out and play the defense that they are capable of playing, at least just often enough to guarantee themselves a couple of things by season’s end; First, a top-four conference seed to give them at least one round of home-court advantage. Second, the knowledge that they can actually defend a game (or 28) for a full 48 minutes by the time their title hopes will demand such things. When the Nuggets play top-ten level defense, they have been nearly unbeatable this season. Do they have the desire and willpower to stick with the D fully enough to get them where they need to be? It appears that would take a lot of resolve.

A single Rockies resolution would be nice, but I could also easily think of a dozen I’d love for them to have, and it’s hard to choose from such a bevy of choices, and so let’s go long, realizing current ownership has no plans to sell. Even an organization that’s shown some of the poor decision-making that Colorado has over the years has also had more than its fair share of hard luck along the way. People forget that the team that preceded the ’07 Rocktober Rockies was almost as rough as last year’s squad, in terms of tough knocks. The ’06 Rox only won 74 games before their magical ’07 run, which makes last year’s 68-win team… what? A canary in a coalmine? Or maybe the far end of a pendulum. Here’s hoping the ’23 Colorado Rockies can resolve to wipe the slate clean, forget about a spate of injuries and hard knocks that knocked around one of their least-successful offensive seasons, and have a run of good luck that might offset the arc they’ve recently found themselves on. Even if it doesn’t put them back in the World Series, their sixth postseason appearance in the last 31 seasons would be just ducky. Can you resolve to have good luck? I’m not sure, but it somewhat feels like the Rockies best shot.

This year’s Colorado Avalanche simply seem to be looking for the resolve they found themselves with to wrap up last season, but a short offseason and solid slate of injuries and changes find the Avs losing more than winning of late, and suddenly right in the middle of the pack in the Central Division. Here’s to a resolution from the Avalanche to skate into the second half of the season looking for the cohesion and focus that carried them to their third championship last season. Resolving to go after another Cup? What a lovely and audacious way to start a new year.

As a Colorado sports fan, and after Monday night’s sobering moment, I’m just hoping to resolve to take all of these moments a little more lightly, and with a little more fun. To remember that while the world has been trying to lay its weight upon all of us these last few years, that these moments are here to bring some of the joy, togetherness, camaraderie, and color back to our worlds a little bit. I resolve to look for a little more of that in my life, and to take my favorite teams successes and failures for exactly the entertainment they are meant to be.

Here’s hoping that whatever resolutions you may have proclaimed or kept to yourself for this year, that they are a rollicking success, and bring you a lot of joy. If you just so happen to be a DNVR sports fan, let’s throw a little extra cosmic energy at those other resolutions above. Even if simply magical thinking, who knows? We might have more success than Pony Morton.