City Lights:

I had a roommate once who grew up in New England, and he told me how rabidly Boston Red Sox fans defended their team. In Boston, he said, you could start a fight by wandering into a bar full of Red Sox fans wearing a New York Yankees cap.

At its best, sports fandom is a way of bringing neighbors together. At its worst, it can descend into the nastiest sort of tribalism. It can also tease out some of the sadder sides of human nature. Every time I watch a grown man scream profanities or pound the table because his favorite team lost, I want to know why he’s investing so much of his well-being in a group of millionaire athletes, and whether he’ll cheer the same players after they’re traded the following year.

It’s one thing to love our high school or college team. But when we root for a professional franchise, what exactly are we rooting for? Not our hometown, because most of the players on a given team aren’t locals at all, but simply professionals who were hired by the nearest corporation. And probably not the individual players, unless we happen to be their friends or family members.

No, what we’re really rooting for is a shirt. Favoring the Angels over the Yankees basically means being overjoyed because the guys in red and white are scoring more runs than the guys in pinstripes. Karl Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and one imagines that if he had lived a century later, he would have amended that phrase to include professional sports.

All that said, I can’t help but be a little moved every time the Anaheim Angels make the postseason. (Yes, I’m aware that their official name is now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, but because that’s by far the most awkward moniker in the history of sports, I’m using their old one out of protest.)

It’s not that I’ll be a better or happier person if they win the World Series. But I was a die-hard Angels fan as a child, back when it was decidedly not cool to root for them, and even though I’ve long since shed that adolescent part of my mind, I still love a little poetic justice.

After all, I stuck with the Angels during some of their leanest years, and that was tough work. I went to a high school — in Orange County, no less — where most kids favored the Dodgers and celebrated when the Angels plunged into a losing streak. Consider that there are countries in the world where you can be killed for rooting against the local soccer team, and you’ll realize how blase we are.

In 1995, the Angels rode high through the first four months of the season and led the American League West by 10 ½ games in mid-August. Then, in typical fashion, they choked in the last month and a half and finished second.

By the time the team went all the way in 2002, it meant far less to me than it might have a decade earlier. But I was glad to see Anaheim finally celebrate, just as I was glad when the Red Sox overcame their own curse and won the World Series soon after. Even if a sports team is just a logo, there’s some vindication in watching last become first.

So as I interviewed Angel fans this week during the playoffs against the Yankees, I joined them in cheering a team that was an underdog for so many years. And maybe a decade from now, when the Angels have sat comfortably on top of the American League for years, I’ll be over at Sharkeez rooting for New York.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com .