There were only a couple hundred people in the gym, and some of them weren’t paying attention.

With just over three seconds left in the tied game, as those who were paying attention anticipated overtime, one of the guards on the home team lofted a pass from under his own basket to a teammate still ten feet shy of half court. The guy who caught the pass turned and tossed a shot he will remember through the net at the other end of the floor.

What I did then was, I laughed at the grand surprise, the lovely improbability. The large woman who had been sitting in front of me was also laughing, and she was kind of jumping up and down, which was the best she could do. She was the mother of one of young men on the team that had just won.

“Oh, my God!” she shouted, and we looked at each other, and we laughed some more.

The team that won that night went on to win a string of less dramatic games and eventually found itself in the conference final.

And then they lost. By two points. After they’d been down about a dozen.

A few days later I spoke with the coach, a friend of many years, who is the reason I attend those Division III basketball games when I can, and the reason I check the very small print at the end of the next day’s sports section when I can’t. I’d called with congratulations and condolences.

“Two points,” I said. “That must have hurt.”

Earlier in the season he had told me he’d learned to stop anticipating what this team would do. To hear him talk, you’d think that he, like the fans, was kind of along for the ride, which is not entirely true. I’ve watched him work. He does his coaching in practices. During games he tries to let his players figure it out for themselves. Sometimes somebody tosses one in from half court.

“The guys gave it all they had,” my friend said. “At the end of the day, we were just not good enough. It hurts to say it, but it is what it is.”

By the end of the two NCAA Division I tournaments that will soon begin, 127 coaches will have had occasion to say something like that. UConn Women’s Coach Gino Auriemma and some other guy who coaches men will have to figure out something else to say.

Soccer specific stadia are the rule, rather than the exception now, and according to veteran soccer writer Grant Wahl, the stadium that the New York team will occupy this spring is “the most advanced, state of the art soccer stadium in the Western Hemisphere.” This season will see a new team in Philadelphia.

On the other coast, last season the expansion Seattle Sounders drew an average of almost 31,000 fans per game.

And in a weird interpretation of the league’s failure to reach a new basic agreement with the players, MLS Commissioner Don Garber has characterized that potential train wreck as more evidence that MLS has arrived. “These are big league problems,” he said this week. “Years ago we had nothing to fight about, so we didn’t have labor issues.”

Negotiations during the second extension of the five year basic agreement that expired at the end of January failed to produce a new agreement, meaning that although the 16 MLS teams are currently training for Opening Day on March 25, the players could opt to strike at any time. They are looking for a higher minimum wage…no surprise, since some of them make less than $30,000 a season…and an end to the system of indentured servitude that allows the league to prevent them from playing for another MLS team when their contracts run out. To suggest that those concessions would endanger the finances of the league – even given how fragile MLS has sometimes appeared to be – seems disingenuous. MLS has always operated under a salary cap, which should serve to give the commissioner and owners all the control they need without nickel-and-diming the rookies and artificially restricting player movement within the league.

This leads to the suspicion that the league and the players have failed to negotiate a new agreement not because the players’ requests are unreasonable, but because the commissioner wants to let them know that he and the owners will continue to unilaterally dictate the terms under which pro soccer will operate in this country.

That stubborn determination could push the players to strike. While basketball fans consumed with March Madness and baseball fans looking forward to their own Opening Day might not regret that development or even notice it, fans of soccer would, and some number of them would shrug and turn away from MLS, which is desertion the still-developing league cannot comfortably afford.

Fans and USA hockey team members react to the 4-2 win over Finland during the Olympic games in Lake Placid, N.Y. on Feb. 24, 1980. (AP Photo)

I can hear the question, asked by some well-meaning reporter in the Year 2030:

“So Dave, it’s been fifty years since the miracle in Lake Placid. What were you thinking as you approached the big game with the vaunted Soviet Union?”

My live-in nursemaid, Evushka, says, “I’m sorry but you will have to speak up. Mr. Silk’s hearing is spotty at best and he refuses to wear his earpiece.”

And then I say, “No. No, I heard the man…. Okay, I’m gonna tell you but for the last time….Evey, bring me a glass of vodka- four fingers, this way,” as I tilt my hand in a north-to-south direction. And then I continue.

“Look, everybody has been scared to tell the truth because we are all scared that we will ruin a good story…. This is how it really was…..

We were a college all-star team. Some guys, as you would expect, went on to have great careers in the pros while others went about living good and prosperous lives away from hockey.  The “miracle” thing? Hell yeah, it was an upset of unbelievable proportions — but that possibility is what sports are all about — and hockey, by virtue of the fact that will, grit and determination — not to mention clutch goaltending (thanks, Jim Craig)  can trump skill in a one-game series at any time.

A lot of things came together for us… a home crowd, momentum, a lethargic Soviet team and a guy named Mark Johnson who basically carried us on his shoulders for two weeks. But you know what? Sweden, Canada and the Finns could’ve knocked off the Soviets that night — they were really that ripe….

It was a hockey game, and I consider Al Michael’s call, ‘do you believe in MIRACLES? YES!’ to be the real impetus behind elevating the game to biblical status. 

I would rather people consider the 1980 gold medal not as a legend but as a benchmark in US hockey.  

Now don’t get me wrong, it changed each and every one of our lives for the better, and I know that I am grateful for all of the ways that “The Miracle” has benefited my life. But frankly, I think the story has jumped the shark. I mean c’mon, how long is Eruzione gonna keep telling sales teams about how they can replicate our standard of excellence? He’s freakin’ 100 yrs old!

What’s my everlasting impression of 1980? That’s simple: we helped grow the game of ice hockey in the USA.  Movies about The Mighty Ducks and NHL teams in Texas, Florida and Arizona? Unheard of prior to Lake Placid. So I think the real accomplishment was this: we were pioneers, not heroes. And that’s just fine. We took a sport that we loved, played as long as we could and left it in better shape than we found it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talking has made me tired. I need a nap…come, my little Evushka….”

Guest commentator Dave Silk was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team.

The opinion of an umpire can alter – even pervert – the outcome of a World Series. Ask anybody who was rooting for the Cardinals in 1985. Or ask US skier Julia Mancuso, who was stopped mid-run during the giant slalom Wednesday because teammate Lindsey Vonn crashed well off to the side of the course. (Mancuso had to go through the course again. She’d been in 6th place at the time of the yellow flag and her re-do put her 18th heading into today’s final runs.)

Even some people who love pro football will acknowledge that any NFL official could call a holding penalty on almost any play. That’s the nature of the game. In the interest of keeping the game on track, the officials don’t do that. Their judgment has a significant impact on how the game is played.

Basketball? Ask any established player whether the officials afford him more leeway than they did when he was a rookie. Ask lots of men who played against teams that included Michael Jordan whether the officials used one set of rules to determine whether Jordan traveled and another set for everybody else.

It can probably be legitimately argued that the results of the games we regard as relatively free from the opinions of judges aren’t, which is kind of fun to consider in the context of the Olympics.

Do Olympic judges and officials have too much power over outcomes? Tell us what you think.

Swiss skip Mirjam Ott delivers the stone to sweepers Irene Schoriin (l) and Janine Greiner in a curling match against the U.S. Tuesday in Vancouver. (AP Photo)

You can always count on the Winter Olympics to rekindle the debate about what is and what isn’t a sport.

Before entering the fray, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the distinction means little or nothing to me. On “Only A Game,” we’ve told stories of belt-sander racers, skillet-tossers, guys who slid frozen turkeys along the ice to some purpose I’ve forgotten, and people who have set records for stuffing themselves with everything from hotdogs to swords.

Were they athletes? Who cares? Their strange and wonderful adventures made for entertaining tales that will long be told around campfires where shiver the children of people who listen to NPR.

So as I approach this debate over what’s a sport and what isn’t, I’m no purist.

Having dispensed with that acknowledgement, I’ll say I kind of like the distinction between sports and not-sports embraced by Dave Zirin, the author of the Peoples’ History of Sports in the United States. According to the chronicles of Zirin, if you can smoke and gain weight while doing something, it isn’t a sport.

That lets out golf, of course, and almost certainly curling, since even those characters who scurry down the ice with their little brooms, sweeping or not sweeping according to the loud and desperate imprecations of their masters, don’t slide far enough to burn up many calories.

On the other hand, by the Zirin measure, figure skating is in and so is ice dancing, since only an idiot would try to smoke while squirreling around his or her partner’s sequined and no doubt highly flammably-clad torso. 

Those who object to calling figure skating and ice dancing sports maintain that whereas an activity in which an inscrutable judging process determines the winner might well be an art, and certainly does require extraordinary conditioning and training, it’s not really a sport if your smile, your music, and the positioning of your rhinestones seem to be as important as whether you fall down.

I see no need to worry about the distinction. Like millions of others fortunate enough to have televisions in their homes, I’ve been entertained by lots of people sliding down hill or around the ice in lots of different ways. Good on all of them. Of course, I’ve cheered underwater rugby, too, and wife-carrying, and once a table hockey tournament in Rhode Island during which almost everybody smoked, and a lot of the guys took no nourishment but snack cake and soda all weekend…

“It’s uphill in cross-country, and at least sometimes they go
Along a level bit of course, as if to bravely show
That gravity is not a factor in each winter game.”
She said this as they watched a skater flirt with all the  fame
That would descend upon her slender shoulders, should she be
Most wondrous of the skaters they were sitting there to see.

“And hockey,” said her husband. “They play that on level ice.
There is no downhill hockey.” And she said, “Yes, dear. That’s nice.”
And then the talking stopped again. For what was left to say?
As skiers skied and skaters skated, curlers curled away,
And hockey players, some of them outplayed throughout the games,
And outscored by a dozen goals or more despite the claims
That they deserved to be there on Vancouver’s shiny ice
Were paying for their presence an alarmingly high price,
At least in terms of goals surrendered. But the pair looked on,
As brightly-clad snowboarders first appeared and then were gone.

They’d watched, as well, the dancers, though the judging, as they’d heard,
Was sometimes as it should have been, and sometimes just absurd.
They’d watched the mogul skiers and they’d wondered how their knees
Could handle all the pounding that they took on those short skis.
They’d taken in the whole of what Vancouver had to give,
And learned that while the games were on, to watch them was to live.
They’d cleared their nights of other sorts of things they might have done,
Deciding that these winter games were all they’d need of fun.
And yet there lurked in both their minds a small, persistent voice
That whispered of the consequences present in the choice
They’d made to watch the Games each night, which they had done instead
Of reading something, cleaning house, or going up to bed.
“What will you do without the games?” the voice would start to speak…
And silently they’d think, “Shut up. We’ve got another week.”

Among the multi-millionaires who’ll be competing in Vancouver is the red-headed Shaun White, sponsored by snow board manufacturer Burton and various companies making energy drinks, sun glasses, and electronic games. White’s endorsement take last year came to more than $7 million, not counting the $500,000 private half-pipe one company built for him in Colorado so that he could develop lunatic stunts away from prying eyes. One of those stunts helped White win a gold medal at the Winter X Games last month. That triumph was worth $40,000, which White may or may not have even bothered to deposit.

Not so long ago, the best a gold-medal winning figure skater could hope for after the games was a temporary contract with a traveling ice show and her smile on a box of Wheaties. Try telling that to South Korean Kim Yu-Na. At 19, a veteran of zero Olympics, she has already been paid a total of nearly $8 million by an automobile company and a bank in her homeland and multinationals Nike, Samsung, and Proctor and Gamble. One hopes her accountants will remember to also include in Kim Yu-Na’s tax returns the $150,000 she has earned for winning three recent international competitions, including the World Championship, but they could perhaps be forgiven for overlooking such relatively insignificant sums.

For years, the wealthiest basketball players, tennis players, and golfers have been making more money from endorsements than they have been paid for playing their games. That the same can now be said of the Olympians most attractive to corporations looking for faces might seem ironic. Whole Winter Olympic teams have skidded dangerously close to extinction for lack of funds. The U.S. speed skating team, for example, was scrambling to buy ice time before Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert raised three hundred thousand dollars on their behalf.

Beyond that, host cities have been known to neglect needy school programs and put off infrastructure repairs to accommodate the Games.

But for the stars backed by giants of commerce, there will be gold, whether or not they finish first. And as always, for lots of the less well-connected Winter Olympians, even those who win, there will be memories and, of course, a suit of clothes perfect for another cold-weather parade.

In fact, that atmosphere has been prevailing for some time now. The weeks – two of them – between the games that determine which teams will face each other in the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl itself are jammed with promotions and parties. The phenomenon transcends sports, and at daily media sessions, t.v., radio, and print reporters and commentators who never dreamed they’d be asked to discuss football find themselves interviewing players of whom they’ve never heard about a game with which they are unacquainted.

In the days preceding Super Bowls past, these circumstances have led to some magnificently awkward moments. Consider, for example one of the media sessions before Super Bowl XXII, which would feature a Washington team led by Doug Williams, the first African American to quarterback a team in the big game. While it may or may not be true that Williams himself was asked “So how long have you been a black quarterback?” it is reliably reported that Mark May, an offensive lineman on the Washington team, was asked “How does it feel to block for the first black quarterback to play in the Super Bowl?”

Do you suppose Mr. May was surprised by that question? And how about Kurt Warner, then quarterbacking the Rams,  when somebody asked him before Super Bowl XXXVI, which was played in New Orleans, “Do you believe in voodoo, and can I have a lock of your hair?”

I don’t know how Mark May or Kurt Warner handled those curious inquiries, but sometimes the players’ answers do make it into the historical record. That’s why we know that when Titans defensive tackle Joe Salave’a was asked before Super Bowl XXXIV, “What’s your relationship with the football?” he replied, presumably with a straight face, “I’d say it’s strictly platonic.”

Professional football is a hard and dangerous game. The Super Bowl draws an enormous audience, and although some who gather for the show are more interested in the snacks, the commercials, and the camaraderie than they are in the game, millions and millions of people will see and ridicule any mistake a player makes. Still, after reviewing some of the foolishness Super Bowl participants have had to endure in the days before the kickoff, can there be any doubt that many of them will be relieved when the game finally begins?

It is a little surprising that some opponents of the network’s decision to air the commercial have based their argument on precedent: the network’s alleged policy to avoid so-called advocacy messages.

Advocacy is in the eye of the beholder.

Can’t it be argued that every ad for a truck or an SUV can be construed as advocacy for the on-going accumulation of enough oil to keep those machines rolling? Historically, a commitment to the provision of abundant oil to a hog-driving populace has been used to justify all manner of plundering at home and abroad. Maybe you think that’s a natural consequence of manifest destiny. Maybe you don’t. Either way, to fail to recognize the intention and consequences of commercials pushing trucks and SUV’s is naïve.

The same holds for commercials for prescription drugs. Never mind controversial matters such as cost or whether the drugs do what they’re supposed to do, the intent of the commercials is to convince consumers to ask for particular prescriptions based on thirty to sixty seconds of glossy education provided by the drug company. This would seem to constitute advocating a particular approach to health care…an approach that pays little or no attention, for example, to diet or exercise.

Then there are the commercials for the army, the navy, the air force, the marines, and the National Guard. Some number of young men and women do, in fact, become all that they could have been as a result of serving in the military. But many who have enlisted end up with post-traumatic stress and permanent disabilities, and some of them cease to believe in their missions, some of which are eventually disavowed even by the people who initiated them. There’s no mention of that in the ads. At least the commercials for drugs list possible side effects, albeit quickly.

The Super Bowl Sunday message featuring Tim Tebow and his mother will outrage some and encourage others, but it won’t break new ground. Their advocacy message will only be the most recent in a long line of commercials designed to accompany a game, promote a particular position, and affect the way we think. Or don’t.

That fans throughout the Super Dome would send aloft together,
While no one in the building had to think about the weather.
But such is not the case, of course, and to the Saints’ dismay,
Miami is the venue where both teams will come to play…

(See, “come to play” might be cliché, but don’t respond with sorrow,
Until I say that for these teams there will be no tomorrow.)
Now you can wail and cry aloud that for the next ten days
You’ll hear about the Super Bowl: predictions, bets, and praise

For Manning, yes, and for Drew Brees, and for the brilliant men
Who’ve led their teams to glory’s brink, as in the old days when
Such geniuses as Belichick, Lombardi, Welch, and Noll
Achieved such fame they knew for whom the bell would likely toll…

From now until the Super Bowl, the airwaves will be full
Of wise and not-so-wise predictions and a lot of bull.
The papers, likewise, those remaining, will be weighing in
And not just on the question of which team will likely win…

They’ll tell you of the cousins, first and second, of the end
Who’ll only play if someone else is injured, and the friend
Who nearly knew the kicker when they lived in the same town,
And how the safety’s fav’rite color once was almost brown.

I know, I know, I’m guilty, too. By writing this I’ve sunk
Into the depths of foolishness, and by providing junk
Like this slow-limping doggerel, this less-than-super verse,
I’ve mounted that bad wagon that is daily getting worse.

But in the land of mad excess, where football is the king,
And where the brightest jewelry is the Super Bowler’s ring,
A fellow who would write of any other game would be
A laughing stock forever. I don’t want that to be me.