This is an exciting time of the year to be a sports fan. October baseball has already been incredible and football season has come into full stride just as basketball training camps are starting up. However, when sports enthusiasm reaches the height of its intensity, mockery of sports fandom also rises to the occasion.

Despite being dominated by athletic competition, American culture has many voices that regard sports as irredeemably trivial, perplexed by the idea that so many could be so enthralled by what amounts to throwing a ball around. In an informal poll conducted on my Facebook wall, 1 in 20 said they would rather see fewer posts about sports and a further 1 in 30 could produce a pseudo-intellectual rant regarding how unimportant sports are.

At one level, at least, this is just more noise in the social media echo chamber. Snark begets likes and likes beget status, which in turn begets snark. Ad infinitum.
Nevertheless, there is a tempting criticism at work here. In the grand scheme of things, how could watching athletic men and women run and jump be a worthwhile use of our finite time in the world? After all, a sport is just a game.

Something like this line of thought seems to be going on behind casual dismissals of sports fandom. Implicit in such thinking is the idea that sports media is a kind of low culture: superficially exciting but ultimately unworthy of serious attention. I think this perspective misses something very significant about why people follow sports and the meaning that they have for who we are.

At its most basic, our culture tells us stories. These stories take many forms and serve many purposes, but what they have in common is the way that they help us make sense of our lives and get in touch with what it means to be human. We learn who we are and how we should be from the culture in which we live. We read novels, watch plays and study film so that we can see the beauty and ugliness of the human condition by peering through the lenses of the characters.

Furthermore, we appreciate the technical mastery of an artist over her craft and proudly describe this kind of creativity as a defining mark of humanity. We often think of so-called high culture as the arts that best exemplify this feature. However, it would be a mistake to think that sports were somehow different and less valuable because their participants do not think of themselves in these terms.

Professional sports are a bountiful source of modern-day narratives. Fans observe, create and develop the themes and characters that are acted out on the playing field. Week after week, good triumphs over evil and vice versa. Men and women fight to bear the burden of heroism only to become the victims of cruel fate. Above all, sports allow us to watch awestruck as our fellow human beings push themselves against the limits of our shared physicality, mastering the art of the game.

Self-cultivation, teamwork and sacrifice have become buzzwords to sell Gatorade, but to deny that these concepts are realities on the field is to choose cynicism over human empathy. These ideas, and many more, are what make sports the beautiful things they are to fans across the world. The merely physical, through the alchemy of human intention and will, becomes the meaningful.

Admittedly, the venerated forms of high culture are better at hiding their origins in muscle and sinew. When we participate in them, we dress ourselves up and turn our passion into cultivated disinterest. At the art gallery, we allow ourselves to entertain the all-too-familiar fantasy of being minds that are only incidentally bodies.

In the same way, the self-styled intellectual in an armchair fancies himself as catering to a higher calling than the woman sitting courtside. Despite this elitism, sports fandom continues unabated for the same reason that art will continue to have an enduring grasp on the human soul.

Both of these practices allow us to tell stories in which we see ourselves and our situation in the cosmos. Ultimately, despite their differences, both of them help us cultivate a passion for being the sort of finite creatures we are.

TAYLOR COLES is a senior in the College. He is a former member of The Hoya’s editorial board.