FOR every person gripped or delighted by the grand finals played on the weekend, there would have been plenty of others who wondered, with irritation, what all the fuss was about.
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Big, blokey footballers crying and embracing each other because they had made better use of the football than other big, blokey footballers?
Spectators cheering themselves hoarse for players they have never met, who might be traded to another club next season?
So much time and energy devoted in the media to what is, in the end, just a game?
Surely, many would have thought, there are more important things in the world.
There are. But those who think sport is a way to ignore the world’s problems are wide of the mark.
Sport is a means of escaping the world’s problems just briefly – for 80 minutes on a weekend, or for the length of time it takes to read through a newspaper’s sports section.
Sport is a way for tens of thousands of people to come together in a stadium – and millions of others in their homes – for a common purpose: to lose themselves in an athletic contest.
Sport gives a sense of identity, of belonging.
It transcends class, wealth, status. Those who stood side by side at the MCG or Homebush Bay on the weekend would have been concerned only by how their side was performing on the field, not by what the person next to them did for a job, or earned, or believed.
When the underdogs – the Western Bulldogs and Cronulla Sharks – won in their respective grand finals on the weekend, neutral supporters all over Australia would have known that what they were witnessing was important.
Important not because it will change the world, but important because, for one evening, hundreds of thousands of people were deliriously happy.
Those victories on the weekend won’t solve any of the sides’ supporters’ problems.
Those who are struggling will still be struggling, those who are poor will still be poor, those who are heartsick will still (after the sudden euphoria fades) be heartsick.
But all those Sharks fans and Bulldogs fans were happy, together, for one night.
So what did it all mean? All the hoopla and the build-up and the post-mortems and the collective energy of all those people?
It meant everything, and it meant nothing.
And that’s sport.
