A simple result?

When I get done with a tournament, my friends simply ask me if I won or lost. I believe that they wouldn't know the details, so I explain it by saying I scored suppose 5/6 so I won 4 games and drew 2. But even after I explain, their question still goes unanswered. Did I win or lose? And for real, this irritating question is the truth. If you stand first in the tournament, you win. If you don’t then even if you stood 2nd or gained 100 ELO points, it doesn’t count. I wonder if winning was as easy as it looks like in the outside world for any sport or any competition for that matter. I wonder how the term ‘winning’ has such a simple meaning. So many times, when you're playing on the board, you give in 5 hours to achieve a winning position and maybe you blunder or run out of time and you lose. Can this be termed as winning? After all, you did achieve a winning position from a terribly difficult position but what matters is only what the end result says. A player, who has targets set for a particular tournament, practices for hours and days and months and even years for that very moment. Is it fair to bring it down to only a win or a loss? Years of practice and determination to one single result? Is it that simple?