The world of sports. I’ve always liked that phrase. Describing sports as an alternate world means offering the chance to go there — the chance to get away from the other world, life.

The world of sports is full of people. You’ll find historic figures, villains, heroes, people trying to make it, people in power and powerless denizens whose only influence is felt when thousands of them band together — that’s you and me, the fans.

How we live in the world of sports is similar to how we live in the real world. We have many different obligations to balance out, business to attend to, family to live with and different governing bodies trying to keep us happy. And while sports can stress us out from time to time, wear us down and plain make us sad, the stakes aren’t truly dangerous — unless you play wide receiver.

We get different cathartic satisfactions out of watching different sports. Games of different sizes, shapes and functions make us feel different things when we watch them.

The game of football, for instance, gives us a feeling of nationhood. The NFL has 32 teams, each of which has an equal chance at success over the long term. On a collegiate level, the feeling of nationhood is bolstered by an increased connection to the players.

Either based on geography, family ties or other personal reasons, you pick a team and stand by it. But you’re standing with an entire fan base, wearing that team’s colors in support, going to a game and letting your screams fall in like one brick into a wall of noise, doing what you can to see that your side wins a game that’s fairly analogous to actual war.

Win a game, and you’re riding high for a week. Lose that game, and your week is dragged through the mud.

Football fandom is best shared between brothers. An 8-year-old, a 30-year-old and a 60-year old experience the game very differently, so it’s best to keep the ages similar. Your father may show you where your loyalty lies and how fierce it is to be, but your siblings are the ones with whom you share that loyalty.

Then there’s baseball, a sport best shared inter-generationally. Baseball is a game that’s easy to understand on a basic level, but its intricacies are learned with experience.

It’s a game’s game, played for the sake of playing. The reason why there’s so much baseball is because that’s how much baseball people want to play. Modern fans may want a shortened season, but maybe baseball plays that many games because it’s fun to.

In baseball, sportsmanship is paramount. When there’s a hit batsman, that batsman’s team may decide it was on-purpose enough to warrant a retaliation, and the other team may decide that’s fair. Brawls frequently break out, but rarely is anyone harmed. We forget these men have baseball bats and can all throw baseballs accurately at 80 mph — if they were trying to hurt each other, they very well could.

Baseball teams are called clubs, and you root, root root for them. It’s OK to lose. It’s a gas to win. It’s not intense like football, and it doesn’t try to be. Baseball encapsulates everything pure about sports.

If baseball encapsulates purity, basketball encapsulates beauty. Basketball players are like snowflakes: No two are exactly alike. Unlike baseball and football, which in their professional leagues boast rosters of 27 and 53 men, respectively, basketball teams have 12-man rosters. In the NBA, you can not only memorize every team, but every player. Basketball players, more so than other athletes, are analyzed inductively. It’s not what they lack, as much what they can do with their particular skill set.

In that way, basketball players are like artists, playing differently the way musical artists might play a song differently. Only in basketball, the greatness of that artistry can be measured in statistics. That individual artistry is why we compare basketball greats more than those of any other sport. We may see that LeBron James has better stats, but Kobe Bryant’s game is so much more graceful and fun to watch.

Like musical interests, basketball is a game best shared with friends. Different players mean different things to different generations, and the fact that your older brother got to see more Michael Jordan than you did and your dad saw the prime of Bird and Magic really makes it hard for you to watch games through the same lens.

College basketball takes this feeling of art and compounds it with the feeling of nationhood, which brings about crazed crowds who admire the team as a whole and all the players individually.

Other sports warrant consideration. Hockey plays out like a caged fight, with two opponents going back and forth in front of a raucous crowd, trying to strike a critical blow amid flurries of defended punches.

Tennis plays out like an argument, a debate between two professionals. The crowd remains almost objectively quiet to allow the back-and-forth discourse to take place until one player proves he is the rightful winner.

Golf is the delicate assembling of something beautiful, to try and create something with a certain par of craftsmanship, a level that great golfers will regularly exceed.

Sports, like life, are meant to be a shared experience. The experience may only take the physical form of cheering about Web gems, dunks and touchdowns, but it is that experience — the thrill of watching and caring about something that we decide is important to us — that keeps us coming back year after year.

_Eliot is a sophomore in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet._