Spoiler warning for Ted Lasso season one. Just stop here if you haven’t watched it yet.

I watched the last episode of Ted Lasso season one today while doing my workout in the basement.

Here is a list of all the scenes that brought tears to my eyes:
1. Nate getting promoted
2. Ted’s pre-game speech about believing in hope
3. Roy Kent limping off the pitch while the crowd chants and cheers him
4. Ted’s post-game speech about how nobody on the team is alone in their sadness

Thank you to everyone who did not tell me how positive and optimistic this show is. I would never have watched it if I had known.

I always dislike the overly optimistic characters. They’re boring and naive, maybe even a little dumb. They are often unknowingly the butt of the joke, but they continue on their merry way oblivious to the human agony around them.

Ted Lasso is not oblivious. Ted knows when he’s the butt of the joke. He sees and acknowledges the negativity in the world around him, the great difficulty of being a person. He acknowledges all this suffering and difficulty, and he chooses to be optimistic anyway.

What.

“Sorry, Nate,” Ted Lasso says in an early episode. “I have a real tricky time hearing folks that don’t believe in themselves.”

I was on the stair-stepper at the gym when I watched this scene and my jaw dropped at that line, that truth. Almost every episode has had a line in it like that, a line that hits me hard and makes me want to cross-stitch it and hang it in my house somewhere so I don’t forget it. My reputation for darkness and negativity crumbles before Ted Lasso’s admonition to “be the goldfish” and forget your mistakes.

But this show really won me over today when Ted Lasso’s team lost the final match of the season. Did they have moments of triumph during the game? For sure. But did they ultimately lose and get relegated to the next league down? Yes, they did, and I am so thrilled the writers went this direction. Because you know what? Sometimes you try your best and you still lose. Sometimes you’re just not good enough even though you try your hardest, but that doesn’t mean you’re worthless or that you shouldn’t believe in yourself anymore.

“Be the goldfish,” I tell myself when I screw something up in the kitchen. “I have trouble hearing people who don’t believe in themselves” I think to myself as I struggle to thread my way through this blog post. These messages live in my head rent-free now and carry me through each day, along with one last edict from the show:

“He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where, Roy Kent!”