I had someone tell me of a friend of his who was like this a long time ago - late noughties. Incredibly ,he supported West Brom. Apparently, come the crunch time at the end of the season, he would always get his battered scientific calculator out alongside a laminated list of fixtures and carefully compute probable wins, probable draws and probable losses, always taking care to compare West Brom's form to their fellow relegation battlers and carefully marking 50-50 games, likely wins, likely losses etc. as such.
At the conclusion of the exercise, nearly every time, he'd arrive at the conclusion that they were sunk. But then, in the weeks afterward, he'd start talking about alternate possibilities - what if they could sneak a point against O'Neill's counter-attacking Villa side, what if they could scrape a last minute winner against a mid-table team, what if they could exploit Arsenal's soft underbelly at the Emirates and score off a corner before going full two-banks-of-four....
Eventually, he'd work himself up into a positive lather and start swaggering around confident in West Brom's ability to beat the drop with panache and style - they were a team of tigers, raring to go, and all it would take to set them off on their run was one of the eventualities of an unlikely point or win gamed out by him in the previous weeks. He told everyone who'd listen that they'd all see come the next game...they'd all see that he was right.
And then they would get ritually slaughtered in their next game, and he would apparently go back and start puttering about with his calculator and laminated list of fixtures all over again.
Point being, as
@K.D.D.D.D.Soc pointed out, that way lies madness.
