Pigskin Flux Capacitor

I've often ruminated on why I hate sports. Occasionally, I've even put those thoughts into print. But I also have ideas about why I love sports, too.

Most notably, I've often thought that sports are perhaps the only source of tangible, objective reality we have available to us. Everything else is so subjective, so wrapped up opinion and perspective: music is good or bad, according to your taste; food is delicious or awful, depending upon what you like; even history and its facts are subject to interpretation. As noted many times before, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. We live in a universe built on quicksand.

Not so with sports. Sure, there are points of disagreement, especially when discussing all-time greats. But for the most part, sports present us with a simple, objective reality upon which we can all agree. One team or competitor wins, the other loses. A game that ends 6-3 is a game that ends 6-3. Not much argument there. In a world of shifting sands of perspective, the sports fan can read the final score and stand steadfastly anchored on solid ground. Sports, in this way, can be a reliable and comforting antidote to all of life's other uncertainties.

So much for that. Yesterday, a fresh, brand new idea--another reason to love sports--popped into my mind, courtesy of the San Francisco 49ers.

Time-travellers Vernon Davis and Jim Harbaugh
Photo courtesy oregonlive.com

Yesterday's dazzling win by the Niners over the Saints has stirred up a feeling that has not been seen around the Bay Area in a very long time. Many folks have drawn comparisons to 2002, the last season when the 49ers made it to the playoffs. The game-winning throw and catch by Alex Smith and Vernon Davis brought back many memories of a similar playoff-winning TD in 1999.

But for me, this run by the 49ers is reminiscent of their original Super Bowl team in the 1981 season. Like the 2011 model, Bill Walsh's first championship team came out of nowhere, after several years of abysmal failure. They too sported a 13-3 season record, yet went into the postseason as decided underdogs against traditional playoff heavyweights like the Cowboys, whom they beat in the conference title game. If the current edition of the Niners makes it to the Super Bowl, they will have dispatched not one but two recent champs to get there.

But even if they lose on Sunday, the 49ers will have accomplished something that has solidified in my mind another reason to love sports: time travel.

The only real form of time travel we have available to us is memory. The only way we can go back to yesterday--or yesteryear--in any sense is through our memories of those past times. And, as noted above, the 49ers' victory has proved that sports can provide a powerful vehicle for evoking those memories.

Maybe not as powerful as Doc Brown's suped-up Delorean in Back To The Future, but at least as powerful as any of the other sources of memory recall we can experience. Art can stir up those memories of the past and bring one a sense of days gone by. Food can do it too. Music may be the most powerful vehicle for evoking that sense of past times and places. And now, I can attest from these past 30 or so hours, sports can perform that same magic as well. The memory of what it was like when I was a kid, when Montana threw that ball to Clark, has been surprisingly strong this weekend. And someday, someone who is a kid today will be able to travel back to this time, when athletes not yet born will make a play with an uncanny resemblance to what Davis and Smith hath wrought on Saturday.

Small wonder then, given its power to evoke such feelings in its adherents, that sports can continue to thrive the way it does, even in the face of all that is so desperately wrong within its purview. Today it may be just a game, but in thirty years today's game, tied to another game in the future, will be a connection to our lost youth, and a window into a lost world.