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Is pain a means to grace? To clarity? Is it an "instrument for perfecting" ourselves? Where's the line between the instructive and the destructive? What are sports meant to teach?

In next week's news, the Oscars become a national holiday, Manti Te'o gets clocked again, and Kobe and Dwight try to work it out, Jeff MacGregor writes.

While you weren't looking, the NFL became our national metaphor for everything. From Sandy Hook to Camp Courage, the measure of America is football.

With the Super Bowl rising this week until it blots out the sun, maybe it's worth asking how and how much technology has changed the way we watch and think of sports.

On the day of Robert Griffin III's knee surgery, we're reminded that football players will do what football players do -- and that football coaches behave as football coaches. As do football owners and writers.

Trying to understand tragic deaths and failing. Considering the nature of violence and human nature. About guilt and complicity. Thinking, in the wake of Jovan and Kasandra, how we struggle with the truth of things.

Why do we insistently mythologize bad leadership and poor decision-making? Why do we treat all coaches with the same mystical regard we treat the best coaches?

On my way to the airport, I think of them flying home in the middle of the night. San Francisco in St. Louis, New York in Detroit, everyone everywhere and back again all at once on their way somewhere else.

Football is the last Great Circus and the last of our epic American fables. To say otherwise is dishonest.

In the end, the resolution between the NFL and officials came down to money. Not the change owners might have saved on pension costs, but the billions rung up by bookies from Las Vegas to Sri Lanka.

In which we return yet again to the work of Samuel Beckett in the interest of clarifying American football. A country road. A tree. Evening. ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done. VLADIMIR: I'm beginning to come around to that. All my life I've...

The scourging, purifying hate last week for a man who ran a football business was kind of extraordinary. Art Modell left Cleveland and the fans did not forget. How much loyalty does a team owe its city?

If the NFL were serious about player safety and player conduct, it wouldn't have locked out the refs. If the general public were serious about saving the middle class, people would be standing up for those officials.

The week in review from death to life, from loss to win, from political metaphors to sports clichés.

The basic contribution of Tim Tebow to professional football, it seems to me, and to religious discussion and to modern American culture generally, has been to embody the essential tension between faith and science.

Maybe it's just spring fever, but something strange is happening in sports. Andy Pettitte, Peyton Manning, Jason Kidd and other graybeards are defying the aging process.