FORT WAYNE – Someone in my position should never write what I’m about to write. But good sense has never been one of my strong suits, so I’m going to write it anyway.

The thing I’ve devoted my entire working life to really doesn’t matter much. Not when you strip it down to the bare wood.

This is a bizarre thing to say, I admit, especially against the current backdrop. A week or so from now, two hours south of here, the greatest embodiment of our national obsession with games will be on full display. We’ll watch, even if we don’t know the difference between a screen pass and a screen door. We’ll watch because we’re supposed to, because this is the Super Bowl and this is America and, somehow, across 46 years, one has become inextricably tied up with the other.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s just a game you played as a kid in your backyard.

Eleven guys will hit 11 other guys in the mouth for three hours, and, when it’s done, the vital interests of the nation will not have been advanced an iota. Oh, lots of commerce will have happened, and the economy of Indianapolis will have gotten a temporary bump. But the game itself will have been only that, a game.

I say all this because something happened the other day, and it wasn’t the first time it’s happened. A man had a football pried from his grasp at a crucial point in a crucial game. And because of that, people took to their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages to threaten his life.

One even threatened the man’s wife and kids. And he’s unmarried and has no kids.

The man’s name is Kyle Williams, who returns kicks for the San Francisco 49ers and whose father is White Sox general manager Kenny Williams. And after this happened, Kenny Williams said it made him question the “culture of sports."

He’s as right as a beach in January about that, of course. If a little late to the party.

Sports have always made some people in America insane; anything that can compel a 40-something man to paint his face in the school colors and don the jersey of a kid half his age suggests a frightening power to warp judgment and corrode perspective. And that’s not even bringing up, say, the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, where grown men wear dog masks, throw dog biscuits on the field and (one suspects) occasionally eat them.

And so you can go back to the beginning of the last century and beyond and find kindred souls to Kyle Williams this week. Death threats are nothing new in sports; the difference now is how easily it is to invade someone’s personal space with them.

You’d love to get inside the heads of some of the sick twists who threatened Williams this week, but it would probably be a fruitless exercise. The impulse that drives them would remain inexplicable, and any attempt to explain it would be like speaking Martian. It simply would not compute.

You can blame the makeup of those individuals for that, and you should. But the “culture of sports” to which Kenny Williams refers isn’t blameless, either. Any culture that spawns an entire network devoted 24/7 to games, after all, is not a culture grounded in reason.

Kyle Williams found that out this week, thanks to a handful of knotheads. It’s the kind of thing, sadly, that obscures everything that is good and fun and redeeming about sports – and, yes, there is a lot to redeem them, even if who wins and who loses is ultimately the least redeeming thing about them.

Or so you’d hope.