Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Dave Depper on Running the New York City Marathon: “It Was Kind of a Major Party”

But yeah, no, it was brutal that the Mariners lost. At the same time, 29 out of 30 teams go home sad every year. It was just our time to go home sad. Hopefully some time in the next four to five years, maybe we can be the last team standing. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I believe the words coming out of my mouth right now.

Dave, do you care about the Mariners at all?

Depper: I do, in a sort of an ambient Pacific Northwest way. I love my bandmates and they’re very important to my bandmates. I felt very invested in that series as a result, and I could not believe that game and how that ended. I was pretty heartbroken for everybody.

Gibbard: I will share one last little anecdote about it if you have time.

Absolutely.

So a good friend of mine who’s a Blue Jays fan, we had made a pact that, starting with the first pitch and going till 48 hours after the last game, we would not communicate at all. For Game 7, I was too nervous to watch it. I listened to it on the radio and walked all over Seattle. I walked from my house on Capitol Hill down through downtown to Pike Place Market along the waterfront, through Seattle Center and the sculpture garden. I just had to be in motion. I’m walking down Mercer [Street] in the seventh inning and we’re up 3-1, and I get a text from this guy. “Hey, man, congratulations on winning the series.”

I write back to him, “What the fuck are you doing? We’re not supposed to be talking right now.” And he writes back, “Ha ha ha ha ha.” He’s a sports fatalist, kind of like me. Within five minutes, the Mariners are down 4-3. I text him, “We had a deal. You broke it. Don’t ever fucking talk to me ever again.” This is one of my best friends! He’s writing me back like, “Hey man, I’m really sorry.” I’m just deleting texts. I am out of my mind. Within 24 hours, I called him like, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry. I completely lost my mind.” He’s like, “No, I totally get it. I probably would’ve done the same thing.” In a way, I’m glad that I just don’t feel like that anymore. I’m sure as a Mariners fan, you as well, you’re just like, I can’t think of anything else in my life except for this.

For a couple hours until I went to bed that night, it was absolutely that. Then you wake up and it’s the first thing that hits you. The Mariners lost a Game 7 last night. For me, going through my life helped. There was a slight part of me that was like, should I take tomorrow off no matter what? If they win, I’m going to want to stay up all night and then sleep until noon, and if they lose, I’m going to be miserable. But what ended up happening was I just lived my life normally, and I think that was actually the correct move.

People were very sad everywhere. Looking back on it, it was a really beautiful way to experience the game, just being in my city. No one was out. No one! There’s German tourists. That was about it.

I had started to think that maybe I was taking this too seriously, that I was letting this affect me too much. Yet everywhere you went across the entire city, people were just really, really devastated. There’s an argument to be made that maybe we shouldn’t take sports this seriously, but there was also something really beautiful about how much this meant to us all. We got so close and didn’t get it, and we’re able to kind of commiserate with each other and share this pain together as a city. That’s how it goes, I guess.