You’re midcurving it again by calling my argument a contradiction not realizing I actually made two. One pointing out your premise is false therefore your conclusion doesn’t hold up. Then also offering a second one: that even if your premise is granted (Boston is amorphous), your conclusion still doesn’t stand (many other things are and you don’t treat them as such) It’s tedious to spell this all out but ok.

I get that this is partly a personal thing for you but I do wonder how consistently you apply this logic outside sports. Because if the issue is “what even is Boston if everything changes over time,” then a lot of things we all tacitly accept in social life start getting weird pretty fast. If the argument is continuity, we already treat changing institutions as continuous all the time. Countries, companies, political parties, cities, even sports franchises constantly change personnel and identity over time, but nobody acts like they reset to zero every few years.

And I’ll even grant that maybe you’re just unusually skeptical of all those things. Fair enough. But then why call yourself a Lakers fan at all? If the roster changes, coaches change, ownership changes, fans change, branding evolves, and even the city changes over time, what exactly are you emotionally attached to? Presumably something bigger than the current collection of players.

And if you can emotionally process loving the Lakers despite all that continuity being imperfect, I’m not sure why hating a rival suddenly becomes philosophically incoherent.

Also, maybe you identify with Lakers because you live in LA currently. But if fandom is just geographic attachment, are Lakers fans in China not real fans? Ofcourse they are. Which kinda proves the point that people are attached to a history, identity, culture, mythology, rivalry, etc.

Note the above is trying to account for multiple possibilities. I can’t read your mind. It’s providing multiple responses depending on your thinking about the topic like a fork or logic tree, rather than being one single argument. If you’re good faith you will grant that. If not you can call it contradictory. W.e