Things change. Sports do not. Take comfort in that.

In life, you can’t always say, “There’s always next year,” because next year, for better or worse, won’t be the same as this one. There is no guarantee that things will get better.

Often times, the good things will be gone next year.

Except when you’re talking about sports. That’s something that isn’t going anywhere.

“The one constant through all the years,” James Earl Jones says in Field of Dreams, “has been baseball.”

Coming from a character based on J.D. Salinger, it carries a lot of weight and truth to it.

If there was a change to make to the quotation, though, it is that it’s been more than baseball. It’s baseball, it’s football, and it has been every other sport, too.

One hundred years ago, Teddy Roosevelt was the president, the Internet could not have even been a contemplated thought and Cubs fans knew what it felt like to win a World Series.

It was a different world, except that baseball was a part of it.

There are no guarantees about what the world will look like in another 100 years, but you can bet that as long as people are still living in it, baseball, and the other sports, will be around.

That longevity, in a world marked by change, is a comforting thought. And it helps to put things into perspective.

It’s why a 40-loss season for the Wisconsin softball team doesn’t matter. It’s how to get over a Super Bowl defeat. It’s a way to deal with 20 consecutive seasons without going to the playoffs.

There will be other seasons. There will be next years.

And, not only is there always “next year,” but there’s always the year after that too. There’s an infinite amount of next years out there.

That’s not to say change is always a good thing. Often it is, but a lack of it can be as well.

Sports favor the latter.

The idea of change has always been — and will continue to be — linked with the idea of hope.

Sports take the opposite approach.

The idea that things will never change means that there will be an eternal hope. As long as next year is out there, so too will there be hope.

Alexander Pope might have been the one to say that “hope springs eternal in the human breast,” but it was the die-hard fans of the Mudville Nine that took the quotation as their own after its usage in “Casey at the Bat.”

That’s because hope did spring eternal for the Mudville Nine when next year, in an even more dire situation than the one in which he famously struck out, Casey connected with a walk-off grand slam.

Next year brought joy back to Mudville just as it can to Milwaukee, or Minnesota, or Miami. Losing seasons end; sports, and hope, don’t.

All the talk of next year doesn’t mean some things should stay exactly the same, however. In fact, there are plenty of things that could use a little tweaking in sports.

Sure, it would be better if athletes didn’t use steroids and if racism and sexism didn’t still play a role in sports, and so on. But those are problems with more clear and fixable solutions than terrorism or world hunger.

And yes, some things do eventually come to an end. Brett Favre couldn’t play forever, but even though he retired, Green Bay will still send someone out to play quarterback next year.

That’s why it’s fun to be passionate about sports. Even the toughest losses can be overcome pretty quickly.

Even after Stephen Curry burned the Badgers in the Sweet 16, Wisconsin will once again field a team next year. Even though the Cubs haven’t won a title since 1908, the World Series is still going to be there for the taking next year.

For every knockdown that sports has to offer, there are no knockouts. The fights continue, be it in the next game or the next season or the next year.

Next year, I won’t write a weekly sports column. But that’s not because there won’t be sports to write about. In fact, you can bet that the things written next year will be some of the same that I wrote about this year, which were the same as was written 10 years before that. As different as next year might seem in some ways, in the sports world, it will be very much the same.

At the end of the semester, it’s easy to think about what next year holds.

Maybe the answer is uncertain. One thing isn’t, though: Sports will always be there.

Mike is a sophomore majoring in political science. To quote Tupac, “I see no changes.” But if you do, he can be reached at [email protected].