Four years ago, just weeks before the baseball playoffs, it occurred to me that I had no idea which teams were playing. Football season had started as well, and I could not name the quarterback, the star running back, the star wide receiver, or the star linebacker of any of the four teams that played in cities I have lived in — the Jets and Giants in New York, the Bears in Chicago, and the Redskins in Washington. And only because of the memory of a recent tabloid headline did I know that Patrick Ewing was the center on the New York Knicks basketball team.

I had ceased to be a sports fan — an unthinkable thought only a few years earlier, when I would routinely make a 10-hour drive from Washington to New York and back to attend games at Shea Stadium featuring my beloved baseball team, the New York Mets. I watched Monday Night Football every week for 15 years, and spent most Sundays in the winter happily sunk in a chair for six hours of Giants and Jets games. And from 1969 to 1975, I handed all my allowance and birthday money to Madison Square Garden so that I could take in a dozen Knicks games a year.