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Opinion: Super outsider

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The New York Times’ David Brooks is the latest cerebral cheerleader for the transcendent virtues of competitive sports -- at least on the college level. ‘In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation,’ he writes. ‘Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.’

Sports as religion will be celebrated on Super Bowl Sunday, though not so much in Pittsburgh, where a priest once donned black and gold vestments to consecrate the Steelers’ quest for glory. I got into trouble years ago when I wrote a piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called ‘How About Those Who? Confessions of a Steelers Apostate,’ in which I outed myself as a football nonfan and mused about the similarity between that status and being a member of a religious minority.

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Even though I’ll be snowbound, along with other denizens of Washington, D.C., on Sunday, I doubt that I’ll turn on the game -- even for the Who’s performance or the Tim Tebow message that has pro-choice groups sputtering. Being a non-sports fan is a cheap way to experience the alienation of the outsider suspected of being foreign to American ways. Hmm, what else is on TV Sunday evening?

-- Michael McGough

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