How does Jeremy Lin happen?

Peyton Manning illustrated last week why football is like anything else in entertainment. He has a future that is essentially unknowable, but storms of speculation swirled around him in a way that was curious because we’re not so good in sports at accepting “I don’t know” as a correct answer to a question, especially not in the soap-opera-for-males world of sports. This led to Yahoo! reporting that Manning’s injury is more dire than expected and ESPN reporting that he had been cleared to play, all of the conflicting information from anonymous sources, noise disguised as news, the media feeding the interest because the interest feeds the media. The truth? Ehhhh, whatever. That’s ancillary. All that really matters is the interest — both the kind given by fans and the kind given by banks.

For two hours, they honored the late hero-villain. Humans always become better people when they are dead. It is the nature of eulogies. So, feeling both grief and persecution, the people in that emotional auditorium last week remembered only the good parts of Joe Paterno’s life and ignored his scandalous punctuation … right up until the billionaire outsider stepped up to speak. Nike founder Phil Knight, unlike any of the other speakers, didn’t have any direct connection to the community in this room. And Knight, unlike any of the other speakers, decided to address the subject no one else did.

So much freedom. So much temptation. It was a long lockout. There were days Eddy Curry felt hungry and tired, and the NBA seemed so very far away. What’s one handful of candy? What’s one missed workout when no one is really working or watching? Curry thought about going to the club, thought about going to McDonald’s, thought about sleeping in late.

The Heat is a huge disappointment for merely getting within two games of the championship. The Marlins, owners of two titles, just spent $191 million to get your attention. Even the Panthers are in first place. It is hard to imagine in a region that has an expressway named after Don Shula and a hospital named after Dan Marino that the once-proud Dolphins are both the least interesting and least competent professional sports franchise in town. Have we ever said that before?

Rather famously, the reckless, renegade football champions at the University of Miami did an excellent job of representing the strange and wonderful city that surrounded them. Fun. Crazy. Out of control. Those teams, in the carnival of sports, even held the racial tension of the time up to a funhouse mirror. Miami, the city, and Miami, the program, were intertwined in a way that made those insane Hurricanes feel like an accurate symbol for this insane city. Years later, LeBron James came along and the Heat took our international city’s superficial evolution and framed it in flashbulbs. Florescent and famous. Big and bold. A little bit “too much” but wearing that “too much” proudly, like the guy buying bottles at the club soaked in all that jewelry and cologne.

Jason Taylor visited the hospital a few days before Christmas with his wife and three kids. They brought a lot of toys for kids with cancer, burn victims, children with deformities. Taylor's children didn't want to leave, they were having so much fun playing, connecting, giving -- unwrapping, in other words, Dad's real and lasting gifts. Later that night, over prayer, his kids thanked each of the children they met by name, and damn if that didn't just about make the tough, old football player cry. It can make you emotional, getting old. Appreciative, too.

What are you willing to forgive?

In the time of ancient Romans, the gladiator spectacle first involved criminals, slaves and prisoners of war as forced participants. The games to the death were noisy and fun, and crowds and interest and gambling kept swelling, so something interesting happened to the bloodsport’s evolution. Free men started taking the gladiator oath, actually submitting themselves to lives as slaves in exchange for the glory and adoration at the center of the spectacle. It is an intoxicant, the admiration of other men and the love of women, leaving a legacy of courage and discipline and machismo, so by the end of the Roman Republic, an estimated half of the gladiators were not criminals, slaves or prisoners of war. They were men who volunteered to fight to the death.

What we’ve learned over the past 149 days without basketball: Soul-sucking acronyms like BRI (Basketball Related Income).

Step back. Sometimes, to really appreciate a view, to see scope clearly, you have to take a step back. This can be true whether you are looking at the art that made the owner of the Miami Marlins rich, or the new ballpark he has built, or the suddenly expensive business blueprint he is now trying to stuff inside it. Step back from the lucrative offers being made to baseball’s stars, away from the florescent and distracting details ($200 million?! Albert Pujols?!), away from even your earned cynicism about whether this is all an elaborate sham meant to create interest, and look at the bigger picture taking shape. It really is a sight to behold.