tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

Henry James' Guide to Sports: Wild Card: Detroit Lions v. New Orleans Saints

In the multitudinous glow of the many-lighted stadium, where stands the individual in relation to his fans, to his city, to his sport and indeed to the firmament? To whom, in the very minute and turn of it, does victory belong? Shall we hand it, as indeed we have before, to Mr. Brees of Austin, Texas, now of the swallowed yet ever-swallowing city of New Orleans? For it is in the perfectly placed pass, the coincidence of vision with that which it sees, that the Good is ultimately found, for what is the Good, in the end, but a moral congruence of the material and the ethereal, a wink from that which is beyond us to that which is before us that we all play for the same team? Thus does Mr. Brees’ pass land where it was intended to land, as we all too often wish our own actions achieve what we saw in our proposals of them. And, as Saints before have had to battle beasts of atavistic vulgarity to attain to their Sainthood, so too must these Saints fight fouling lions, who think with the helmets that protect the brains they seem not to need. Sainthood is not, indeed never has been, easily granted; but granted still it must be to the rightly aimed and rightly caught pass, and once more that rare wheel of fortune will turn to the Good, to those few who know that the Good and the Fortunate are not so different after all.

Henry James’ Pick: New Orleans Saints