Football, Basketball and Our Perception of Time
Because of rules that stop the clock, the last two minutes of a football game or a basketball game can go on and on, with reversal after reversal. I particularly remember the Harvard-Yale game of 1968. At one point Yale led 22–0. And with two minutes remaining, they still led 29–13. Then in a series of improbable/impossible flukes, Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds. The headline in the Harvard Crimson the next day read “Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.”
A 2008 documentary including actor Tommy Lee Jones, who actually played for Harvard in that game, brings that event back to life. (That’s now available streaming on YouTube, Google Play, AppleTV, and Amazon Prime.)
Having endured the agony of that game (from the Yale side), my perception of time has been skewed ever since. And that distortion has been reenforced repeatedly since then by one instance after another of last-minute changes of fortune in critical football and basketball games. Now I realize that that is a good thing, a very good thing.
Our lives are limited. X years and it’s over. But those years are made up of minutes, and minutes can miraculously expand. That’s probably the closest we come to immortality. No wonder we become addicted to time-limited sports.
