JAW, DROPPED: This Grantland anthology of the year's best moments in sports, thank goodness, captures the three that for me will linger for a long time. Two positive ones -- the ecstasy of the Women's World Cup quarterfinal match against Brazil and the remarkable night which ended baseball's regular season, but also the one negative: the Los Angeles Lakers' classless exit from the NBA playoffs, a disgusting failure of leadership and character which too soon has been forgotten.
Of course, it'd be better to be able to enjoy sports in a world in which you didn't have to wonder which institutions were covering up the rapes of children, and which exciting collisions were leading to lifelong brain trauma. But sports have never existed in a vacuum; this is just the latest iteration of the horrors which cannot be isolated from sports anymore so than they can be isolated from life itself.
