L.A.'s best teams were saving grace

Their heroics helped make a tough 2025 a bit more bearable

- BILL PLASCHKE COLUMNIST

It was the last story I wrote before everything changed.

It was Jan. 5, 2025, and I was marveling at the Rams gumption in their shorthanded loss to the Seattle Seahawks.

"It was weird," I wrote. "It was wild."

I was so witty. I was so wrong.

Two days later, I was fleeing for my life, steering my car down narrow Altadena streets with a fireball at my back and a nightmarish future sprawled across the smoke-filled streets ahead.

Now that was weird and wild.

The year 2025 was more tumultuous than any silly football game and its accompanying overwrought metaphors. It was a year that knocked me flat, tearing me apart from so many things that once anchored me, setting me afloat in a sea of guilt and despair and ultimate uncertainty.

Today, I have a home but no home. My days are filled with the beeps and growls of bulldozers. My nights are draped in the silence of emptiness. What was once one of the coolest secrets in Los Angeles has become a veritable ghost town, the vast empty spaces populated by howling coyotes and scrounging bears.

And I'm one of the lucky A lot has changed in the 12 months since the Eaton fire spared my house but destroyed my Altadena neighborhood. I say a daily prayer of thanks that I did not endure the horror of the 19 people who lost their lives and thousands more who lost their homes. I am beyond fortunate to live in what was left behind.

But virtually nothing was left behind. Venerable manicured homes have been replaced by weed-choked vacant lots.

Familiar local businesses are now empty parking lots. There is the occasional sighting of new construction, but far more prevalent is “For Sale” signs that have seemingly been there for months.