I had the equivalent of a 12-day sports-induced panic attack last fall.Starting with a 2-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Sept. 17, the Toronto Blue Jays lost six times in seven games. They started that day with a five-game lead, plus the tiebreaker, on the New York Yankees, who were second in the American League East. A week later, they were tied. The Blue Jays would need to win out to clinch the division and earn a bye to avoid the Wild Card round.That last weekend of the regular season, I drove from my home on the east side of Toronto to a suburb just north of the city, where my parents live. My brother or I make the trip at least once a week to make sure everything is in order for my dad, Mark, who has Parkinson’s Disease, and provide some help to my mom. When I arrived, my father was at the laptop checking a box score. He was not looking at the Jays’ stats, though.He was looking at the box score of his formerly, and suddenly again, beloved Chicago White Sox. They entered their final series of the year with a pristine 58-101 record, going up against the 65-94 Washington Nationals. Huge implications. Believe me when I tell you this: As I got to the TV to turn on the Jays game as quickly as possible, he was paying rapt attention to the Sox-Nats game tracker. This was true diehard behaviour. (The Jays held on to win the division, needing the tiebreaker. Lest you be left hanging, the White Sox took two out of three in Washington.)Some time between his retirement in 2017 from his long career as a lawyer and last year, my dad reengaged with his childhood love of the team on the South Side. He took his fandom up about five levels. In the process, he taught me something not just about sports or life or death, but a confluence of the three. If you love sports, hold on to them to the extent that you can, even when life gets complicated. If he could fully invest in a team for whom a 19-win improvement led to a miserable 60-win season, what excuse do I ever have in raising the white flag and checking out of a season for one of the teams I love?To be clear, my dad never gave up on his love of the White Sox, whom he randomly chose as his favourite team as a seven-year-old kid in Chatham, Ont., in 1959 when Chicago won the AL pennant. That was their first World Series appearance in 40 years. He moved from Chatham, which is about 50 miles east of Detroit and the hometown of Baseball Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins, as he frequently told me, to Toronto a year later — 17 years before the Blue Jays played their first game. He never traded allegiances.When I was growing up, he kept a Harold Baines baseball card attached to the sun visor of his 1984 Chevrolet Eurosport. He used to joke — I think — that he loved Baines, the White Sox designated hitter and future Hall of Famer, more than he loved me. For his birthday one year, we got him a new vanity license plate that read “SHY SOX.” (CHI SOX was not available in Ontario. Did fellow drivers think my dad had a passion for bashful hosiery all those years?)Writer Eric Koreen, right, and his dad, Mark, a once-lapsed White Sox fan who has returned to the fold. (Danielle Perelman Photography courtesy of Eric Koreen)As I look back, though, there were signs that his enthusiasm had waned. When I was 8, I thought it was really important to call him at his office on Aug. 10, 1993, to tell him that the White Sox had traded reliever Bobby Thigpen to the Philadelphia Phillies. Surely, my dad would want to know that the guy who recorded 57 saves in 1990, a league record that held up until 2008, was gone. Instead, he didn’t seem to care. In my dad’s defence, Thigpen was good for minus-0.6 wins above replacement that year.