Game-changer: American sports bring us transformation, unity and even miracles

It is a question both essential and eternal in the pursuit of understanding the pull.Sports has that.

Sports envelops us, has held on to us for as long as there have been scoreboards and grandstand seats and fans who keep their eyes lasered on the former and swarm the latter.The question:Why?Why do we care the way we care?Why do we invest so much of our souls in the outcomes of games contested by strangers?We are consumed by movies and prestige television shows.Everyone likes a good night at the theater.

We are obsessed with music.One weekend in 1969, 400,000 Americans gathered in upstate New York to listen to a cadre of rock ’n’ roll bands; 16 years later, they held separate yet simultaneous festivals in Philadelphia and London for even more bands, all in the name of the hopeful cause of feeding the hungry.But sports is something else altogether.

Sports is losing yourself in nine innings, or 15 rounds, or four quarters, or three periods or 10 furlongs.Sports is losing sleep when those games go badly for us, or for exulting and experiencing unparalleled euphoria when they go well.

We get more of the bad than the good, every sports fan knows that, but we keep shaking that off.Keep coming back.Why?“A champion,” the great prizefighter Jack Dempsey once said, “is someone who gets up when he can’t.”We are drawn to that, yes.

We are drawn to life’s winners, always.But sports in America has also forever been the forum in which higher goals are met and broader accomplishments are pursued.

Sports always seems to be the barometer forecasting change and the cudgel forcing it — often a few steps, or a few decades, before the rest of society.In 1936, that was embodied by Jesse Owens, a 22-year-old black man born in the American South and educated in the country’s heartland, at Ohio State.And in a time when he couldn’t have shared a drinking fountain in his own hometown of Oakville, Ala., Owens united the entirety of a nation over the course of seven ...