Today's epistle is about sports and fandom.
See, there's a lot of TV to write about. Too much, sometimes. There are shows that have a huge audience that beg for analysis. There are shows that need your attention. There are shows that fail and it is worth wondering why they fail. There's all that. And then there's the biggest TV event in this country in a very, very long time.
It's this: The Toronto Blue Jays will start their first playoff run in 22 years at Rogers Centre in Toronto against the American League West champion Texas Rangers (Sportsnet, 3:30 p.m. ET).
The stadium will be full of cheering, roaring fans. That only accounts for a tiny percentage of the people who will, for now, become passionate supporters. The rest of us will watch on TV as this glorious adventure unfolds. We are still part of it. Never mind talk about "bandwagon" come-lately fans. This is a mass movement.
Sports fandom of this kind is the most benign form of madness. And if you're not able to be in the stadium, television brings you to the stadium.
I'm no expert on the Blue Jays. But I've covered sports, specifically soccer, for 15 years and attended some of the most dramatic sports events on the planet. Watching it all on TV is also good. I've done a lot of that.
The kind of sports fandom that blossoms now, when a team enters the postseason drama, is an arena where enchantment, emotional mayhem or frustration will unfold. An imagined community becomes real. The local becomes, literally, the centre of the universe and everything about the local – in this case Toronto – is fetishized, heightened and spellbinding. People draw their identity not from self and family or workplace, but from the group. Anonymity, the blight of existence in a globalized world, evaporates and it's the group that matters.
All manner of meaning can be read into our obsession with sports. Most obviously, the stadium is a temple or church and the fans are believers. The team rewards loyalty with salvation, in the end. The ritual of watching in a bar, and drinking copiously while watching can be seen as an allowed form of Dionysian revelry. The responsibilities of work and orderly behaviour are put aside for a time and carousal is allowed.
In some sports, especially soccer, fandom has its own meaningful rituals and theatre. The putting on of elaborate costumes is the ritual "masque" or masquerade played out, with its attendant pantomime of exaggeration and it shifts the elaborately costumed fan from being spectator to participant in the unfolding drama.
In North America, fandom is less about masquerade or carnival than it is about meaningful uniformity. Fans wear the team uniform en masse and in that find strength and pleasure. A city gripped by a postseason run by its favourite team is a happier place and there's a purity in the emotional attachment of the fans. It is a truly shared experience, something that is rare in a fragmented society, and only the dullest heart would be unmoved by it. The city surrenders to the game and all emotions to one purpose alone are devoted.
This is a time when fanaticism is allowed, when shared anxiety is entirely benign, whether we are in the stadium roaring, in the bars watching or at home glued to the TV screen. It's a joyful journey that begins Thursday. Let the revelry start and, as the hashtag says, #ComeTogether.
Airing Thursday: The Nature of Things (CBC, 8 p.m.) is a repeat but one of those must-see programs, if you're a parent. The episode is called The Allergy Fix and looks at Canada, the United States, Britain and Germany to investigate why the number of children with allergies is on the rise and what's being done about it.
One startling part is summarized as this: "Clues to the increase may be found on farms, because kids growing up on dairy farms have far fewer allergies than city kids. It's called 'the farming effect,' after a German study revealed farm kids had only half the allergies of urban kids. It seems that without the kinds of bacteria that have traditionally lived around us and within us for hundreds of thousands of years, our immune systems have become confused."