Out of interest, how do major US sports compare to football over here? I know that many are - for reasons of sheer practicality - divided by geography. But will a baseball/hand-egg/basketball team enter a season with a shot at winning 3-4 trophies, some more prestigious than others?
There's only one trophy in all 6 of the major-ish sports. I suppose you can count winning the division or league, but it's very much the equivalent of getting to the quarterfinals, semifinals or finals of the playoffs, which are always knockouts. The closest thing to an exception is college football or basketball, where winning the conference is a bit like winning your derby.
Of course, with 6 teams every year, some team you back is bound to win something eventually. So the title itself takes a back seat to some other memory of a winning team, for me anyway..
When I was 13 and went to see the Pitt Panthers college so-called football team with one of my closest friends. Miles said, "Pitt's starting a freshman running back. 150 pounds. Typical PItt." I laughed. I'd gone to every home game a couple of years earlier with my dad, when they came within one game of a perfect record, but sadly in a way managed to beat the University of Miami. Their best athlete was the mascot, which in these parts is the guy or girl who puts on the animal or bird suit. The Pitt Panther performed acrobatics on the goalposts and wrestled the Notre Dame Leprechaun to the ground.
The first play they pitched the ball to the kid. He started to run. I realized something strange was going on. Everyone else was running at one speed, and the kid was running at a very different, much faster speed. Tackling angles disappeared one by one. We all stood up and started to yell.
Three years later I turned on the radio to hear a radio announcer describe the same kid running against the biggest college football team. He's at the thirty, the forty, the fifty, the forty, the thirty, the twenty, the ten. That happened five times that game. Tony Dorsett broke his own record for most yards against Notre Dame, won the award for best college player, and led Pitt to the college football national championship. At the moment he retired, he had gained the second most yards in both college football and professional football history. But the moment I'll remember most vividly was his first play, when I stood up and started yelling, and realized maybe my college football team might have a good player for once.