Explaining Losses

Winning and losing is implicit in the nature of competition. There must be a scorecard, a results tally. Someone must win, someone must lose. However, should the losing party attempt to explain their loss—something that I continuously find rather puzzling, and which usually comes in the form of excuse making or blaming—their explanation, at bottom, usually amounts to: “If only you hadn't won, I would have!” Indeed... a most astute observation.

I often wonder why people feel the need to explain their losses to those around them. Take a card game, Euchre, for instance. When a person wins a trick, you will often find that one of the losers will say something like: "If you didn't have that King, I would have won it!" Or, if the situation is such that whomever wins the trick wins the game: "If you didn't have that King, we would have won the game!" Now, I can't for the life of me think of a more uninteresting thing to say. Again, "If only you hadn't won, I would have!" Great. What an exceedingly riveting observation. Why don't we sit here for another 20 minutes hashing out all the ways you could have won—"if only things had happened differently"?

Why do people do stuff like that? Is it because they're embarrassed they lost? Is it because they want the winners to know that they (the winning party) just barely eek'd out a victory, and that they (the losing party) are not so very bad after all? No doubt I will encounter the said situation again at some point in the future. And when I do, perhaps I can cross examine a few people and figure out just what is going on in their minds when they say such things.