I was struck by something on my walk to the subway this morning. I’ve been following sports in earnest since 1987, when I was six years old. I remember watching the 1986 World Series with my family, but I didn’t understand it or recognize its import. I took up the Mets the following offseason, perhaps in part because of that championship but more likely because I was finally old enough to appreciate how awesome baseball is.

Anyway, sometime not long thereafter I started following the Jets and Knicks (to varying degrees). I’m nominally an Islanders fan, but let’s ignore hockey for the purposes of this discussion because, well… because it’s what people so often do.

2012 will mark my 26th year of following sports, and I have not yet known the glory of seeing one of my teams win its sport’s title. Actually, I shouldn’t even say “glory.” I don’t know if it’s glorious. It seems that way, but really I have no idea. I’m going to be 31 next week and I have been following sports for my entire conscious life, and that feeling — the ultimate reward for following sports — is still foreign to me.

I spent part of this morning trying to determine how many other cities might have fans as unfortunate as I have been these past 21 years. Granted, it’s inarguably better to have a perennially lousy professional sports team than no team at all, but I looked up all the cities with MLB, NFL and NBA franchises to determine if it’s feasible any fan in any city, choosing from local teams, might have it as bad as I do. One of those days.

Boston fans, you know, have seen recent successes from their teams in all three of those sports. Chicagoans who favor the Cubs have not seen an MLB or NFL title in the stretch, but can hang their hats on the Bulls’ unbelievable Michael Jordan run in the 90s. It has been mostly bad for them from Detroit, but they’ve got the lone Pistons championship in 2004 to hold on to. And so on.

Things have been nearly so bad for San Francisco Bay Area natives — likely on the Oakland side — who follow the A’s, Raiders and Warriors. The A’s won the World Series in 1989, but those teams have been otherwise quiet since.

Cleveland has a case: Neither the Browns nor Cavs nor Indians has taken its league championship since the Browns won the pre-Super Bowl 1964. And Seattle’s teams have been silent, title-wise, since the Supersonics took the crown in 1979.

But if you want to pick nits here — and I do, because this is about proving to myself how bad I have it — Mets/Jets/Knicks fans can claim this pathetic distinction on a technicality: The Browns, of course, have not operated continuously since 1987, and Cleveland was without a football team for three seasons from 1996-1998. And the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.

So no fan who came of age after 1987 and has followed continuously operating local MLB, NFL and NBA franchises has it quite the same as the Mets/Jets/Knicks fan. Certainly a case can be made that the Mets’ World Series berth in 2000 and the Knicks’ finals appearance in 1999 mitigate the suffering, but in truth it’s all about RINGZZ and my teams have f@#$ing none of them since I’ve been paying attention.

I imagine a lot of you are in the same boat. Let’s wallow in self-pity!