If I get a chance to watch the New Orleans Saints host a playoff game at the Superdome next week, I might finally realize what those much smarter than yours truly have known for decades.
Sports provide an escape. When life is kicking our butt, we take an afternoon and watch professionals kick each others' for three hours.
I've been fortunate enough not to realize this firsthand yet. Not when a typical week looks like the following:
Write one or two or six stories, tape a 30-minute sports talk show, read countless newspaper sports' sections online, apply for jobs in sportswriting, interrupt a perfectly good dinner with senseless arguments like the BCS or who's a Hall of Famer, catch any hockey game the TV execs accidently allow to reach the airwaves and sometimes even have the time to run, lift weights or play a sport.
By the time winter break hit, I needed an escape from the escape. Something to take my mind off the mindless.
I found it on the other side of the world.
By taking a 10-day trip to Israel over break, I spent Christmas 6,000 miles away from the Lakers-Heat game, and I still don't know who won. I spent New Year's Day 8,000 miles away from the Rose Bowl and heard that result considerably later.
But more than the distance was the disconnect. For the first time in a long time, there was no instant information at my fingertips. I didn't feel the need to pay 15 sheqels (roughly four dollars) for 10 minutes of Internet time at the hotel, because frankly I didn't want to know.
Now in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that it was not a perfectly legitimate ten days without sports: I did watch a few minutes of the Liverpool-Bordeaux Champions League match in Hebrew.
But I'm not really counting that as watching sports - not because the game was played two months ago, but because it was soccer. (Dangerous thing to say on a campus where you see so many jerseys of the historic soccer clubs Carlsberg Beer, O2 and Fly Emirates. Let me assure you that I'm only kidding.)
But it was close enough to 10 days without sports that it allowed me to get a better picture of what was real and what was a distraction from reality.
I still came through Customs at Kennedy Airport and asked my mother the score of the Penn-North Carolina game almost before I gave her a hug and a kiss.
And I quickly learned that I didn't miss much. As it turned out, everybody told me that the best thing I missed was the Fiesta Bowl when Bob Stoops and Co. fell for the same play I did in second-grade recess.
But as that game would have been ending, right around 7 a.m. Israeli time, you know what I was doing?
I was waking up and beginning a drive along the Israel-Lebanon border, where, this past summer, reality provided a serious kick in the butt.
And as I was enjoying the escape from my escape, I realized how lucky I am to have even one to start with.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
