Here’s the thing about sports, and sports fans, and the more reasonable among us who understand there is beauty in the balance between what matters and what doesn’t: We usually get it right. We usually understand, without much thought, the difference between diversion and delusion can identify the lines of propriety.
On Sept. 12, 2001 — and Sept. 14, and Sept. 16— it was understood sport had to cease for the time being. There still was a smoldering wreck at the southern tip of Manhattan, there still were armies of family members hoping against hope and logic that the missions at Ground Zero were still search-and-rescue, not search-and-recovery.
Playing baseball games in those hours would have been beyond inappropriate. Playing NFL games on Sept. 17 and 18 would have echoed the worst hour of Pete Rozelle’s commissionership, when the games went on in 1963 while President Kennedy lay in state.
Almost immediately Rozelle knew he had erred, and paid for his gaffe with a conscience that taunted him until the day he died.
Rozelle, after all, was like you and me: In his heart, and in his head, he knew right from wrong, he simply made a mistake, copped to it, and served as a cautionary tale for everyone who would come after. Baseball nearly played on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, then thought better of it. There were some who actually lent voice to the show-must-go-on philosophy after 9/11, but they quickly were muted by voices of reason and perspective (notably Michael Strahan, in his finest hour of a career marked by some awfully good hours).
The terrorist this time was nature itself, a cruel truth. You talk to friends and family members hit hardest by Sandy, that is the helpless part: There is no ham-faced villain to point to, no jackbooted enemy, no hate-spewing ideologue, not this time. The rain that normally nourishes our soil, the wind that normally cools us on hot summer days, this time conspired to wreak havoc and nearly wreck us. That’s a hard truth to reconcile.
But the result is the same: There is pain and sadness and loss all around us, in Breezy Point and Seaside Heights, in Rockaway and Moonachie and Hoboken, around the corner from us and next door. Yes, there is value in sports occupying our thoughts and suspending our worry and allowing us a moment to sample normalcy again.
It’s just not now. Just not tonight.
The important thing is, everyone got it right, postponing the Knicks-Nets game in Brooklyn tonight and preventing what would have been an epic case of misplaced judgment. It isn’t necessary to over-praise Mayor Bloomberg for essentially forcing the NBA to do the right thing, same as it isn’t imperative to fillet the short-sighted decision makers who were originally going to allow an event to go on in a building celebrated for its devotion to public transportation even as saltwater continues to eat away at subway tracks in stricken stations and tunnels.
Here is what matters: They got it right.
We’ll know when the time is right to resume, whether that’s tomorrow at the Garden or Saturday at Barclays or Sunday at Giants Stadium and the Verrazano Bridge. We’ll know the same way we knew on Sept. 21, 2001, even before Mike Piazza turned a good night into a forever night with one swing of his bat. We’ll know the same way we knew it was right to play Super Bowl XXV in Tampa in the early hours of the first Gulf War, even before Whitney Houston reduced us all to weeping, flag-waving football patriots.
Sports is absolutely capable — commissioned, even — to lift us out of doldrums and despair. It always has. It will again. It was easy to think that sports never would again matter to us the same way as they did before 8:46 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and yet less than two months later Yankee Stadium shook as it never had before on back-to-back nights thanks to Tino Martinez, Derek Jeter and Scott Brosius.
Our neighbors, our friends, our relatives now pondering ruined homes and lost family mementos and performing the grim task of taking snapshots for insurance adjusters? Those of them who care about sports will care again. When they’re ready. When it’s time. And tonight wasn’t that time, not yet. It just wasn’t.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com