Whether I’m proud to admit it or not, sports have controlled the better part of my 19-year-old life.

I’ve missed family holidays and vacations to attend baseball games and basketball tournaments throughout the region. I’ve willingly put off school assignments and studying so I could stay up late into the night to watch a big game.

Sports are like that cheating, all-around terrible girlfriend that your closest friends tell you to stay away from. But no matter how badly you want to get away from them, they just keep suckering you into making the same bad decisions over and over again.

Following the Patriots’ 28-24 victory over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX Sunday night, I was once again faced with another choice in which sports wiggled their way into being the deciding factor of what my next actions were going to be.

As expected, hundreds of students piled into the Southwest Residential Area to celebrate Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the rest of the New England Patriots winning their fourth championship in the past 14 seasons. I could have very well been one of the students in the middle of the concourse celebrating with my peers, classmates and best friends. It’s not every year you see your favorite team be the last one standing, holding up the coveted trophy.

But once again I let sports – or my natural instinct at this point – make that decision for me.

Instead of running outside to throw snowballs, climb trees or even get in the face of police officers, I stayed inside my dorm in the exact same spot I watched the entire 60 minutes of the game from.

Why? Because what I witnessed was greatness and it was something that I may never again get to see in my life.

I witnessed the greatest quarterback of all time defy all odds, overcoming a 10-point deficit in the final quarter against the league’s best defense to win what was the greatest football game I’ve ever watched.

Sure, the 2001, 2003 and 2004 Super Bowls were special, but I was in elementary school at the time. I didn’t know what it truly meant to see your favorite team win the Super Bowl. I witnessed the two collapses against the Giants in 2007 and 2011 and still didn’t realize the significance of the game itself.

Sports are more important to me than a foolish 40-minute celebration.

Watching Brady hoist what very well could have been his final Vince Lombardi Trophy was a no-brainer. And if you truly are a Patriots fan, that moment should have been more special to you than running into a mosh pit full of drunken college kids.

Any Patriots fan that tries to tell you otherwise just doesn’t get it yet.

My decision to stay inside wasn’t based on the principle of respect for the administration of the University of Massachusetts nor the respect to the police officers that were forced to miss the game to keep things under control. The thought of staying inside to preserve the integrity of my degree didn’t even cross my mind in the heat of the moment.

Thirty years from now I’ll look back on this night because of the game that was played and not what took place afterward at my school. I’ll look back on that night and remember that I watched the greatest game of football with some of my best friends and I will happily say I watched it until the very end.

I didn’t gather outside because the sports nerd inside of me told me not to.

And I couldn’t be prouder of that.

Andrew Cyr can be reached at [email protected], and can be followed on Twitter @Andrew_Cyr.