Amy Bass

The Olympics are coming -- just in time for Americans to take a big breath, settle on the couch, and root for the home team. In the midst of more political chaos than my brain can handle, the Paris Olympics might be exactly what we need right now. Lafayette, to rephrase Colonel Charles Stanton’s famous words in 1917 when Paris celebrated American Independence Day, we are coming.

It would appear that we are going to have to say this once more for the people in the back: women’s basketball is a thing. And if it isn’t your thing, then hush.

On Sunday, Caitlin Clark became the leading scorer in NCAA Division I basketball, passing Pistol Pete Maravich’s longstanding mark in Iowa’s 93-83 win over Ohio State.

Redemption is a key element of sport. That moment of “play again?” keeps us -- players and spectators alike -- engaged, wondering if the result will be different the next time and then the time after that.

On December 3, Green Bay handily took care of Kansas City, 27-19, on a typically blustery day on the gridiron at Lambeau Field. But the battle between the Packers and the Chiefs paled in comparison to the competing headlines regarding the women on the sidelines: Taylor’s boyfriend versus Simone’s husband, and the fact that none of that felt misogynistic or demeaning pretty much summarizes this past year in sport.

“It feels like a fairy tale,” a friend said to me, mere seconds after the Lewiston High School boys’ soccer team clinched Maine’s Class A North championship title and secured a spot in Saturday’s state championship final. Indeed, the 1-0 win, with the lone goal coming from a brilliantly timed cross that Caden Boone got an aggressive head on, did not just feel like one more step in the city’s healing journey. It felt like a celebration.

It was a heck of a weekend in sports. Most of my attention focused on Simone Biles landing the Yurchenko Double Pike, now called the Biles II, on the vault in Antwerp and the sheer dominance of the American women as they got started at the world championships. For those of you who like to count things, that’s the fifth element named for Biles: one on beam, two on floor, and now a second on vault.

The history of sport is filled with bloopers and blunders, mistakes that still make us shake our heads in disbelief. In 1919, the Red Sox (you knew I was going to start there) sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. In 1968, NBC switched from a 32-29 Jets versus Oakland game to an airing of the classic film Heidi, meaning viewers missed the final minute of play, in which Oakland scored twice to win by 10.

I now have entered, as I do each year (when the Red Sox have failed me), what I consider to be the dark season of my sports fandom. The U.S. Open, my favorite of any sports event, is over and football, which I personally cancelled years ago, is back so hard that Coco Gauff woke up Sunday to nary a word about herself on ESPN’s home page -- and ESPN covered the event.

August is a complicated month for me. In the first few weeks, I head to Cape Cod, spending time with family and friends on the beach, enjoying sunny days and increasingly brisk nights, eating lobster rolls and watching meteor showers. As the month ends, it’s back to school, which for me means back to the office and the classroom, the flurry of writing syllabi and prepping for courses mitigated by the joy of reconnecting with students and colleagues.