On Oct. 27, the anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, the dictator’s great-grandson Romano Floriano Mussolini surged forward from his position at far-right back to score his first goal in Italy’s Serie A league for Lazio, the Rome club whose fans traditionally feel that Benito’s goals were, when you think about it, sadly misunderstood, whatever you think of his tactics. The goalkeeper at the Sassuolo-Lazio game, Stefano Turati, shares a surname with one of Benito’s first victims, Flippo Turati, a founder of the Italian Socialist Party who, much like his sporting namesake, tried and failed to block Mussolini’s advance, in his case into the editor’s chair at the party newspaper.

We are living in an age of parody. History is meant to be subtle, if not inscrutable. It is not supposed to rhyme with the clodhopping obviousness of a verse by William McGonagall (the Scottish versifier who, until the advent of Amanda Gorman, was considered to be the worst poet ever, but who, unlike most poets, nevertheless made a living, albeit in the circus along with the other freaks). As McGonagall masticated the art of more talented precursors into a ludicrous pulp, so the serious matter of politics has fused with the frivolities of sport, making politics a clownish field of dreams and sport the last public activity in which the audience both cites and understands statistics.