Ted Lasso came back today.
Three years after we were told the story was finished, the man is back in Richmond with a new team to coach. Nine more Wednesdays after this one. I am not going to tell you a single thing about the first episode.
I do want to be honest about what is going to happen to me, though, because I have spent two posts arguing that the honesty is the point.
I am going to cry.
Not at the end. Somewhere in the middle, at nothing in particular. I never see it coming, and after three seasons I still cannot predict which scene does it. A fifty-five-year-old man alone on a couch in Lakeside, California, with his eyes full, over a television program about a fictional football club.
And it will not be the first time this week that something like that has happened to me.
The Confession
I cry at concerts.
I saw the U2 residency at the Sphere three times. The same show. Three times. I could have described the setlist in advance and I went anyway, because what I was buying was not information. Eighteen thousand of us in a room that stops being a room, singing words we have all known for thirty years, and somewhere in that a hard edge inside me gives way and my eyes go.
I cry at sports. Not at wins. At the other thing. The retirement speech. The kid who made the roster. The guy on the top step of the dugout who cannot look at the field.
Monday at six o’clock Eastern, thirty MLB front offices finished doing arithmetic on hope. That is what the trade deadline is. It is the one day a year when American baseball puts a number on how much of a future each city gets to keep.
Detroit sold its ace to Los Angeles. Baltimore, sitting at something like a seventeen percent chance, sold its franchise catcher to Boston of all places and took back a farm system for him. Somewhere in Maryland a man my age looked at that and felt something break, and it was not about baseball.
What My Team Did With Its Hope
And then there are my Padres.
Eleven games behind the Dodgers. A rotation that had been held together all summer with bullpen games and duct tape. Then they won eight of nine, which put them one game out of the last wild card going into Monday, and A. J. Preller did what A. J. Preller does. Robbie Ray from the Giants in the afternoon. Casey Mize from Detroit with the clock essentially at zero. Three of the top nine prospects in the system went the other way, one of them seventeen years old.
Both new arms are rentals. Free agents in October. Whatever happens, San Diego does not keep them.
Look at that ledger honestly. A seventeen-year-old’s entire unwritten career, traded for something like nine weeks. There is no asset at the end of it. There is nothing to depreciate, nothing to book, nothing to show a shareholder in November if it does not work.
Preller’s explanation was six words long. They are trying to win, and they do not apologize for it.
That is not analytics. That is a theology with a budget.
Same afternoon, same arithmetic, three different answers to one question. How much hope is left, and what would you pay to keep it breathing. Baltimore said not enough. Detroit said not this year. San Diego said all of it, and threw in a teenager.
I got a lump in my throat over a transaction wire. Machado and Bogaerts are not getting younger, the window has a date on it, and my team decided the date was now.
And now it is August, which is the most spiritual month in the American calendar and nobody says so. Thirty-two football teams are undefeated. The Hall of Fame Game is tomorrow night in Canton. Every camp in the league is filing practice reports that drip with optimism, ninety men in every building who each privately believe they are one of the fifty-three. None of them are lying. It is just that in August, belief is still cheap and nothing has been subtracted yet.
I am always optimistic at this time of year. Every year. I have never once learned.
For most of my life I filed all of that under sentimentality. A soft spot. Something a serious man keeps to himself.
I no longer think that is what it is.
The Circuits Do Not Check Your Credentials
Go back to Lisa Miller’s four circuits from Part One of my last series.
The mind goes quiet. House lights down. First pitch. The chatter in my skull, the manuscript, the board deck, the tax problem, simply stops. Not managed. Stopped.
You feel held. Eighteen thousand people singing the same line at the same second. The infant circuitry comes online. I am not carrying this by myself.
Attention opens. The narrow anxious question, what do I want, how do I get it, gives way to the wide one. What is being shown to me right now?
The boundary softens. This is the one people do not admit to. In row 214 I am briefly not a discrete unit with a calendar. I am distinct, and also part of one thing.
Loved, held, guided, never alone.
Four for four. In a stadium. At a streaming service.
I am not claiming a stadium is a sanctuary or that Bono is a bishop, and I am not going to pretend the neuroscience has been run on a preseason game. But Miller’s central finding was that these are not beliefs. They are perceptions, running on dedicated equipment, the way sight and hearing do. And equipment does not ask what building you are in when it fires.
That is the whole thesis of this series arriving in a place I did not expect it.
The organ is universal. And so are the containers. They are just not all called churches.
There Is a Name for the Tears
Here is the part I did not know until last week, and it delighted me.
The thing that happens to me at Lasso has a research literature. A team of psychologists, Alan Fiske at UCLA with collaborators including several in Oslo, which I take personally, got tired of the vagueness of the English phrase being moved and gave the state a Sanskrit name: kama muta. Moved by love.
Their model is precise about what triggers it, and this is the sentence that stopped me: the trigger is the sudden intensification of a communal sharing relationship. Not sadness. Not beauty. Connection, suddenly increasing.
The physical signature is exactly what I have been embarrassed about for forty years. Tears. Goosebumps. Warmth in the center of the chest. A lump in the throat. One study found tears and goosebumps arriving together and called it a psychophysiological climax, which is a wonderfully clinical way to describe what happens to me in the fourth quarter.
They found the same signature across nineteen countries, five continents, fifteen languages.
And then Fiske notes the thing that ties the whole series together. In religious settings, when this state gets intense, people do not call it being moved. They call it ecstasy. Rapture. A burning in the bosom. Being touched by the Spirit.
Same state. Same tears. Different vocabulary, depending on the room.
Huxley squinted at the mystical texts in 1945 and said the traditions were describing one country. Miller put the traditions in a scanner and found one set of circuits. Now here is a third instrument, pointed at the ordinary Tuesday version of it, a video, a hymn, a homecoming, a walk-off, reporting the same country again.
Three instruments, eighty years apart, no coordination between them.
At some point the convergence stops being a curiosity and starts being the finding.
Why This Show, Though
Watch what Ted Lasso is actually made of.
It is not a comedy about soccer. It is ninety percent repair of communal sharing, administered weekly. Estranged people restored. Someone cruel turning out to be frightened. A man apologizing on purpose. The sign over the door with one word on it, taped back up after somebody tore it down.
If Fiske is right about the trigger, the show is not accidentally moving. It is an engine built to fire circuit two, over and over, on a schedule.
Which also explains its critics precisely. If you find the show manipulative, you are not wrong about the mechanism. It is a cultural practice whose function is to evoke this state, which is exactly what Fiske says hymns and flags and wedding toasts are. You are only wrong about the verdict. We have built these devices in every culture we have ever had, because the capacity needs somewhere to go.
For many years a great many of us have had almost nowhere to put it. So it comes out at halftime.
The Flip Side
Now the part I actually want to say, and the reason I am writing this on premiere day instead of waiting for something more dignified.
Miller’s eight-year imaging work found a thicker cortex, across the regions of the awakened brain, in people who sustained a strong personal spiritual life. Those are the same regions that show up thin in recurrent major depression. Her image for it is two sides of one coin.
I want to be as careful here as I was in Part One. Crying at a soccer show is not a treatment. Nothing in a blog post should change what anyone does about their care. These are associations and buffers, and I am not going to inflate them on my way to a nice ending.
But sit with the shape of the coin for a second, because the shape is encouraging in a way I have not seen anyone say plainly.
If despair is a narrowing, the mind loud, no one holding you, attention clamped down to threat, the boundary between you and everyone else gone rigid, then the tears are the opposite motion. Quiet, held, open, permeable. Not an escape from the hard thing. The other face of the same equipment.
Which means that every time you get choked up at something ridiculous, you are getting evidence. Not that you are soft. That the circuits are patent. That the thing which protects you is online and reachable, and that you know at least one reliable route to it.
If you cry at Ted Lasso, your equipment works.
I would put that on a card.
And I would add the finding from Part One that keeps me writing about this: the protection is strongest where the experience is shared. Not private practice. A congregation, a minyan, a sangha, or a stadium, a group text during the deadline, a couch with somebody else on it. The tears are the signal. The company is the medicine.
Which is a reason to watch the thing with your kid instead of alone. I have some catching up to do there, as I confessed at length two posts ago.
For the People Who Run Things
I promised in Part Two that I would keep bringing this back to work, so:
Every person on your payroll wept at something in the last month, and told no one at the office.
They have all located the state I have been describing. Through a show, a song, a granddaughter, a mosque, a marathon, a fishing boat. The capacity is not a question in your building. It is at capacity in your building. Maslow found that businessmen’s metamotivations were not repressed but merely suppressed, and that a direct question was enough to break through.
So here is a direct question, and I have used it: what is the last thing that moved you to tears?
Ask it badly, and you get HR complaints. Ask it as the fourth question, not the first, in a room where you have already made it safe to say I do not know what this is for, and you will learn more about what your people are actually organized around than a year of engagement surveys will tell you.
Two guardrails, same as before, because this idea is easy to abuse.
Do not manufacture it. The distance between an organization that permits this and one that engineers it is the distance between a hymn and an advertisement. Kama muta is a devotion emotion. Aim it at a quarterly target, and you have built something ugly, whatever you call it. Trust and vulnerability first; the feeling is a consequence, never a program.
Do not bill for it. If you are moving people while their time is not their own and the Time Dividend goes unpaid, you are not in-spiriting anybody. You are running extraction with a better soundtrack.
Believe
The sign over the door in that show says one word, and the joke of the whole series is that the word is not a strategy. It cannot be reverse-engineered, defended in a deck, or run as an initiative. It is not even a claim about the odds. Richmond is usually going to lose.
Which is the right way around, and it is where I have landed after two posts of arguing with Maslow and church history and myself.
I could not get to certainty. I have said so publicly and I am not going to resolve it now.
But I never lost the organ. Nobody does. I have simply been running it in a stadium, in a dark arena in the Nevada desert, in the ninth inning, and on a couch on Wednesday nights, in the years when I could not run it in a sanctuary.
Thirty-two teams are undefeated tonight. My eyes are going to be wet by nine o’clock.
Standard equipment, working exactly as designed.
Turn the lights on. And go watch it with somebody.
Sources
Hidden Brain, “Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain,” Parts 1 and 2, with Lisa Miller (2026). Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain. Alan Page Fiske, Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion (2019), and Seibt, Schubert, Zickfeld et al. on cross-cultural kama muta responses (Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2018). Wassiliwizky et al., “Tears Falling on Goosebumps,” Frontiers in Psychology (2017). Abraham Maslow, Theory Z (1969). Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945).
Related: Rescuing the Baby, Part One · Rescuing the Baby, Part Two · Heia Norge!: A Patriotism You Have to Earn · In-Spiriting the Firm
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If these themes resonate with you, I have written about them at length in my books, including Room to Be Human. They are attempts to say the same thing I have been circling here: that we are built for connection, that the equipment is already installed, and that most of what we need is permission to use it.
