Sports

20-time English champions, three-time European champions, and the most-followed football club on the planet. United has been my team since the Sir Alex Ferguson era — Premier League nights, late-90s treble lore, and the never-say-die comeback against Bayern in 1999.

• ◦Founded in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR Football Club — railway workers who literally built their own pitch.
• ◦Eight Busby Babes died in the 1958 Munich air disaster; ten years later United became the first English club to win the European Cup.
• ◦Old Trafford has hosted football continuously since 1910 — locally nicknamed the Theatre of Dreams.

Two-time ODI World Champions (1983, 2011) and two-time T20 World Champions (2007, 2024). Watching India play is my default form of patriotism — chai, family on the couch, and someone yelling at the TV.

• ◦India's stunning 1983 World Cup win against the mighty West Indies — the bookmakers had them at 66-1 — turned cricket into a national religion.
• ◦Sachin Tendulkar holds the record for most international runs (34,357) and most international centuries (100) — figures unlikely to ever be broken.
• ◦India became the first team to win a Test series in Australia in 2018-19, then did it again in 2020-21 — with a B-team.

Local team, dynasty energy. Seven-time NBA Champions including four titles in eight years (2015, 2017, 2018, 2022) thanks to a Steph-Klay-Draymond core that rewrote how the modern game is played.

• ◦Set the all-time NBA single-season regular-season record at 73-9 in 2015-16 — one better than Jordan's Bulls.
• ◦Stephen Curry is the all-time NBA leader in three-pointers made — and broke the record while still in the middle of his prime.
• ◦The team is one of the founding NBA franchises (1946) and is the only team to win NBA titles representing three different cities — Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Oakland.