As I put the last two hours in on a late night oil burner Monday, a sudden realization struck me.

College — this thing that we are doing — is a kind of sport.

Think about it. You spend long hours studying, practicing your skills and you have to demonstrate them within a two-hour time span. Odds are, just like the professional athlete that gets behind a podium and berates his teammates for 30 seconds, you berate your professors for their unspectacular performance for up to 30 seconds after the exam.

After that, it's all about the next class, the next paper, the next exam, the next grade and the next game. You don't get hung up on the losses simply because you can't afford to. So what if you're going to forget all of that Western Civ final in those same 30 seconds? If you performed up to standard in the minute, at the very instant, in the now, you've assembled your own small victory for the week, and you move on.

With all of these things cascading through your head at any given instant, the odds that you're actually taking the time to read this column are pretty slim. Not to mention Dickens, Orwell, Faulkner, Joyce, Vonnegut or any other great writer. The last time I read any of the greats was when I had to for a class. (If English Professor Edwin Block is reading this, I've fallen a little behind in the readings for British drama. That was a good two weeks ago. I'll catch up eventually, I'm sure.)

Point: You can miss a lot of stuff if you're caught in the rat race.

Take the fox, for example. Believe it or not, there is an honest-to-God living, breathing red fox that inhabits Marquette's campus. Yes, I know this is the city. Yes, I know you don't believe me. I don't care; I haven't seen it for a good year or so, but it was there, and that's important. Take Ziggie's chicken paninis, George Webb's at 4 a.m. and all the small things about this campus and pile them up together to make some kind of weird collage of all the little things that you typically overlook on a daily basis.

This is analogous to all the little things that go into making a great basketball game, for example. There are those little superfluous flashes of athletic ability, the sheer exuberance of sport, that go unnoticed for things like records, numbers, statistics, home team pride, drunkenness and crowd mentality. Take Travis Diener's clutch three or Dwyane Wade's inevitable drive to the hole, pile them up, distill them from all the beer-fueled-crowd-mentality-Final-Four-cheerleader-chimpanzee hoopla that you'll find on ESPN, and there's actually a kind of grace there.

It's a kind of grace that you can't bottle, mass-market or call a Warrior or a Golden Eagle. If you believe in God, it's God's grace. If (like me) you don't believe, it's something you can't explain, but like the fox, it's there and it's important.

When we've exhausted whatever kind of terrible anger we harbor for one another over the political correctness of sports names, it's this grace that will redeem whatever nickname we pick and allow us to move on, long after, as Dickens put it, "the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold."

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on May 2 2005.,”Brian O'Connor”

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