Permit me a little bit of self-indulgent ranting, but I like to think of myself as a winner…. Permit me a little bit of self-indulgent ranting, but I like to think of myself as a winner.

As a high-schooler, I was part of a state football championship and the first district soccer tournament title in my school’s history. As a fan, I’ve enjoyed three Duke national titles in basketball, a pair of Penguins Stanley Cups, plenty of winning Steelers teams and the Pirates — OK, the Pirates aren’t a good example.

But, once in a while, a time comes when winning just isn’t meant to be. The Yankees had the late ’80s, the Lakers had the early ’90s, Ben Affleck had “Reindeer Games.” And “Gigli.” And “Jersey Girl.” OK, Affleck is another bad example.

We’ve all had those hard times, though — some more than others (see also: Eagles, Philadelphia) — you just have to take it on the chin and move on.

This weekend, I suffered through one of those times, and it began with the most reliable of the teams I usually cheer for: the Duke basketball team.

I can’t really narrow it down to one thing. Shelden Williams fouled out, J.J. Redick had an average game, the officiating was atrocious (both ways, but it nailed Duke hard down the stretch) and in the end, the Dukies lay dead on Good Friday.

I should’ve seen it as a sign of things to come. That night, my roommate invited a bunch of his high school friends over to play poker. Eight players in with $5 buy-ins, and before I knew it, the Duke game seemed like a distant memory, as I was $20 up with our scheduled time to cash out less than an hour away.

But not this weekend. I should’ve seen it coming. A series of bad cards, bad draws and bad beats, and I cashed out with only my buy-in. Not technically a loss, but a moral defeat.

Saturday came, and I started out with the national pastime: “MVP Baseball 2005” for Playstation 2. I thought all would be well after a good night’s sleep, but who was I kidding? After starting a beanball war with the Cubs out of frustration, I quit after three games of matching the Savannah State basketball team’s winning percentage this past season.

Thankfully, my parents visited for the holiday weekend, so I was able to kick back and relax, despite the morbidly rotten run of luck.

My dad is a horseracing aficionado and there are no racetracks within two hours of my other town of residence, Lynchburg, Va. So, visiting this area, one of the things he most wanted to do was make a visit to the racetrack, and there I was, naive enough to think I was “due.”

Betting on the horses usually isn’t that difficult if you know how to read a race form, which I do, and it’s usually even easier at The Meadows outside of Washington, Pa., where the national Driver of the Year, Dave Palone, finishes in the money nearly half the time.

If you’ve read this far, I probably don’t need to detail how it went.

After going to Easter Mass at Heinz Chapel, my thoughts became infused with the optimism of new life. Apparently, the Holy Spirit isn’t a sports fan. I couldn’t even get a win in the sports a lot of people don’t care about

I got home from church and turned on ESPN2, only to find the U.S. national soccer team was already trailing 2-0 in Mexico City to our southern neighbors. Despite pulling a goal back, they lost the World Cup qualifier 2-1.

Side Note: I must admit, this didn’t bother me so much, just because it wasn’t my home country Socceroos, and I like seeing Bruce Arena and his soft, crybaby golden boy captain Claudio Reyna go down in flames — but that’s another story.

Then, in a last-gasp effort to have one winner on the weekend, I went to the National Rugby League Web site to see how my beloved Parramatta Eels had fared.

You guessed it — they lost 18-10 to the Cronulla Sharks.

And with that, my weekend ended and I was as winless as the Pirates in interleague play. I think of the Chicago Cubs and how they’re everyone’s loveable loser, and of how that could be me if I could just get the loveable part down.

But to quote an old favorite movie of mine — one I watched before my On-Demand stopped working, another highlight of the weekend — “It can’t rain all the time.”

Of course, that line is from “The Crow,” and given the tragedy that befell Brandon Lee, that might be the wrong thing for me to quote, given my luck this week.

Matt Grubba is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News, and he’s hoping a black cloud doesn’t start following him. E-mail him at [email protected].