He’ll Be the Guy Yelling, ‘Go Tillers!’

Everybody’s gotta have a team. Life’s just not as fun without one.

What better way to prove you have a pulse than to experience amped-up levels of frustration, surprise, anger and happiness. If you’ve got a team you really care about, it’ll deliver all those feelings to you at one time or another.

You tell yourself not to care, but you can’t help it. You care, baby, you care.

At midlife, I figured my days of adding new sports loyalties had ended. My near-lifelong rooting for my home-state Nebraska Cornhuskers and adopted baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, had given me 45 years of as much emotional pain and exhilaration as one fan can handle.

The last place I’d have expected to embrace a new team was Orange County. And a high school team at that.

I moved here in 1986, already well into my 30s, with absolutely no ties to the place. Since then, I’ve never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of the Lakers, Kings, Rams, Ducks, Trojans, Bruins or any other pro or college team around. Slowly but surely, however, I’ve had to clear a little space for the Tillers of Tustin High School.

It started uneventfully. Good friends in Tustin started inviting me to games in the early 1990s, and I started going to Tiller football and basketball games. Then I wanted the Tillers to win -- but mostly so my friends would be happy. No sweaty palms for me.

Over time, that changed: Now I want the Tillers to win so I’ll be happy.

Nowadays, I’m the one pumping a fist when they do something good and harrumphing when they goof up. At a game in late January, I had the jitters as junior Danny Cavic stepped to the free-throw line with time expired and the Tillers behind by a point. No way, I said. A moment later, pure joy as Cavic coolly sank two free throws.

Early on I thought the Tillers had, at best, a decent team. But week by week, the team has gotten to me. I knew I was hooked a couple of weeks ago when the Tillers eked out a one-point road win over Brea Olinda, which was 23-2 at the time. In the first game between the two, Brea Olinda had clobbered the Tillers in the Tustin gym.

Now Tustin, 18-8, is in the CIF playoffs as a wild card. Last week, my friends and I saw the Tillers beat Kennedy on the road, but we missed the next game in Rosemead. I figured the Tillers would lose that one, but they didn’t.

As I write now on Tuesday afternoon, the Tillers are still alive and await the arrival in a few hours of Mayfair High School. The second-seeded team in the division, Mayfair is favored to handle the Tillers.

I ask Tustin Coach Richard Bossenmeyer about my adopted team. “They’re not only solid athletes, but they’re good people as well,” he says. “As a coach, that makes the experience, win or lose, enjoyable.”

I sensed that. After my Tustin friends had sent a note to the team, wishing it well in the playoffs, the team replied with a thank-you letter, suitable for framing and signed by all the players.

Without doubt, Bossenmeyer says, the Brea win was the season’s high point. Earlier that week, Tustin played its worst ball of the season. To then go on the road and beat a highly ranked team that had lost only two games ... well, that’s the beauty of sports.

“That was one night when it all came together,” Bossenmeyer says. “It kind of gave them affirmation that, yes, if they play hard and go after it, good things will happen.”

By coming out of the closet and confessing to Tillermania, I’ve probably jinxed the team. Its season could be over by the time this goes into the paper.

Sorry, guys.

But take it from somebody with a lifetime of knowing the agony of defeat: There’s always next year.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.