One of the reasons I love sports is for a magical feeling that you get to experience very rarely in real life. Thanks to the structural adversariness of competition, which is set up to pit everything on one side against everything on another side, every moment bubbles with this gloriously live profundity that both encompasses and dispenses with everything you know about the situation. It's unpredictability with comprehensive analysis on either side. It's everything you know about this world being put not only on the line, but put directly to the test.
Watching Trubisky take the snap, drop back, make a daring throw that smokes to a spot, and lo and behold, it's a beautiful catch and throw. You're not used to watching the Bears end up on the fortunate side of these plays. And you realize that all the prior traumas and judgments are being challenged with every new play. Your life is being written in front of you at all moments, but never bolder than now.
My favorite canard about sports is that, like philosophy's ability to settle the unsettled mind and vice versa, it's able to provide binary, causal certitude to people who know that life is full of the exact opposite. It's an ontological vacation. But it's also an epistemological vacation. It's everything you know thrown into the gauntlet of the newly transpiring.
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