Sports offer an escape, an oasis, a relief from the anxiety and troubles of day-to-day living. There’s the competition, of course. There’s also a reassuring certainty.
Clear-cut winners and losers. Scores meticulously kept. Rules and boundaries that are officiated and maintained as firmly and precisely as a chalked third base line.
In short, none of the compromise or messy ambiguities of daily life, which is part of the appeal and also part of the fantasy.
And it is fantasy to try to divorce sports from the times we live in and the events that unfold, sometimes frightfully, beyond the comfortable confines of the stadium and arena.