People who watch an athletic contest, be it Little League or the Super Bowl, may think of themselves as just plain enjoying sports. They can cheer or boo, drink beer or soda, laugh or cry, bet or care little, and let it go at that. Anthropologists, sociologists, liturgiologists, and all the other -ists who study human behavior, however, will not let them go it alone, unobserved. Seldom, say such scholars, do people show themselves more involved with ritual than at sporting events.

The formally religious among the players or crowds may think of themselves as engaging in ritual only at Passover rites, on their hajj to Mecca, at Mass, or at their daughter's wedding. But students of the ways of mortals often see more passion, more disclosure of meanings, and more revealing teases about ultimate reality when the same folk participate in or observe sports.

Looking for ritual in sports and for sports as ritual is an attempt to learn much about both ritual and sports. Athletic doings need rules of the game, and so do we. At the moment, the rules require that we define ritual. And we find that there are more definitions of ritual than there are scholars and rites, since each onlooker may bring several inquiries to mind in various circumstances. But — and I am here listening to Evan M. Zuesse — we can understand "as 'ritual' those conscious and voluntary, repetitious and stylized symbolic bodily actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences."

"Conscious"? That's no problem. We're not dealing with tics and quirks but with planned and ordered behavior. Boxers are out to "kill" each other within three-minute rounds but are penalized for any punching before or after the rounds. They know what they're doing, at least until they're beaten senseless.

"Voluntary"? No problem. One chooses to be on the team and to enter the arena for contact sports, in which one is likely to feel pain and may get maimed. Ritually crashing onto the field in a row of helmeted warriors makes possible a readiness for both sacrifice and an experience of glory beyond the bounds one normally sets or gets.

"Repetitious"? Put on ritual-seeking spectacles and you will soon have trouble seeing the nonritual in sports. Children are schooled in repeated activities, whether in the game or cheering and cheerleading. Just listen to their coaches and to them.

"Stylized"? Let men pat each other's rumps in skintight trousers anywhere else as they do after a football play and you will see them stigmatized. Let them reach for the wrong part of the anatomy, and they will be put on trial. Sports legitimates some stylized gestures only.

"Symbolic"? Yes, in most contests ordinary actions point to extraordinary meanings. A National Hockey League player in Canada was once killed on the ice. The rites and ceremonies of the skating teammate acolytes were as intricate and fraught with meaning as a papal coronation or a monarch's last rites. There could be no closure otherwise.

"Bodily"? Indeed, that is what sports are all, or almost all, about. Ritual provides boundaries for bodily action and legitimates what would normally be out of bounds.

That leaves only the centering on "sacred presences" and/or "cosmic structures." One does not have to be a social scientist to see athletes as superhuman icons, sports heroes as idols, and Hall of Famers in any sport as a kind of posthumously invoked "communion of saints."

"Cosmic structures": Athletics point to ways the world is arranged. More and more the erotic element in sports is being reexplored; we use ritual to routinize and celebrate the way sex fits into the framework of the universe. Sports involve sacrifice, of energy and limb; who sacrifices without ritual? Losers and flubbers experience shame. Ritual helps one cope with disgrace. Violence? Yes, or haven't you noticed how integral it is in its many forms, from cerebral in the warfare called chess to physical in contact, now called collision, sports?

When one consults the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, sports and athletics will turn up marginally. It seems a bit cute and precious to say that sports are religion. But bring up ritual, the cosmos, and the sacred — all of them at the edge of religion or standing behind it — and sports will receive privileged attention. Or, at least, they should.