What sports does

Even the kid himself knew the ending. That is the remarkable thing here.

And so the magic spread out and out that glorious October night in Ross-Ade Stadium, and then its focus narrowed, tighter and tighter. Eventually one wan, bald, bespectacled young man filled up the lens, became the living avatar for Purdue 49, Ohio State 20 -- and of course much else.

Indiana and America and, yes, even the world, eventually, was introduced that night to 20-year-old Tyler Trent, who had predicted this great thing. And who was commencing to die on that night, and knew it.

Bone cancer came for him when he was 15 and then came for him again, and it had him this time. Two days before Purdue 49, Ohio State 20, he'd been ralphing up his guts from the latest round of chemo; for the next two-plus months after that night, as he became an inspiration and example for living your life until you had no more life to live, he gradually slipped away from this expanding circle of friends, famous and not so, that had its birth that night in Ross-Ade.

Everyone knew the ending, even Tyler Trent himself. But by the time he died on the first day of 2019, it didn't feel like an ending, somehow. It felt more like the end of a beginning.

This is because, even as he was commencing to die, Tyler Trent's focus was on those still living with the cancer that was killing him. As his story spread, football fans all over the Big Ten began chanting "Cancer sucks!" Riley Hospital for Children and the V Foundation received generous donations in his name; Purdue initiated several scholarships bearing his name. He donated a line of cancer cells to assist researchers.

And does any of this happen without that night in Ross-Ade Stadium? Does anyone outside the Purdue community know Tyler Trent's story, and do celebrities and media figures and ordinary people all over the world keep the spotlight on him -- and, more importantly, on the research that one day will keep other Tyler Trents from commencing to die?

I don't know. I don't know how anyone could know for a certainty.

I do, however, know that hardly anything can bring people and causes into sharper focus than sports. And that through its prism we see things that have nothing to do with the mundane business of touchdowns or 3-pointers or home runs, or whether or not the College Football Playoff should be expanded.

All of that is nothing, and yet it is everything. Because all of it is a stage as spotlit as any.

Yes, there are people who don't care about sports, who don't follow them, but that doesn't mean they can entirely escape them. People who don't follow basketball still know who LeBron James is. People who don't follow football know who Peyton Manning is. This is because the stage is bright and it is vast and it seeps past the boundaries of the football field and the basketball floor into popular culture, and into the ubiquity of social media that makes popular culture inescapable. And if that stage elevates much that is dopey and inconsequential and sometimes awful, it also elevates much that is sublime.

And so, Purdue 49, Ohio State 20. And so, Tyler Trent, the kid who knew the ending, and who because of that stage and that spotlight was gifted with an influence he might never have known otherwise, and exerted that influence to its fullest good.

And in so doing, reminded us what all these silly games we follow can do.