The unspoken deal between sports fans and their favorite teams and players has been, in theory: Sure, there are billions of dollars being thrown around, but at the core, sports are supposed to be fun and games, a never-ending menu of two- or three-hour escapes into a land of winners and losers where nobody really gets hurt.
For all but the most starry-eyed fanatics, that worldview unraveled in 2022 — much as it did the year before, the year before that, and the year before that, and so on. A more accurate assessment might be that sports are not so much an escape from the world's problems as simply another window into them.
