Football, in fact, brings families together around TV sets, and it is wispy nonsense to think that in its absence fans would turn to those pursuits most pleasing to sports bashers. But they do some wonderful things. They give people release from their workaday worries. They dramatically provide exhibitions of athletic excellence, as well as of character or lack of it. They give people a common topic of conversation and enable communities to cohere to a degree that would otherwise be unlikely.
Sports are celebrations of sorts.
They pick people up. The days since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have surely been among the most dispiriting that Americans of these times have experienced. The loss of more than 6,000 lives is almost too awful to contemplate, and on top of that is the awareness, both heightened and unwanted, that whole cities are vulnerable to terrorist hate. It has almost seemed as if this bright and shiny country can never be so bright and shiny again. And yet this past Sunday, as you checked in on football games around the country, you could not help but see that Americans were already finding their way back to a buoyancy that typifies us, and that the joy of watching this thoroughly American sport was helping them do it.