Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.

Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti. Giamatti was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966)
Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1975)
The University and the Public Interest (1981)
Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (1984)
Take Time for Paradise: Americans and their Games (1989)
A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University (1990)
A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A.

Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti (/dʒiːəˈmɑːti/; April 4 1938 – September 1 1989) was the president of Yale University and later the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball.