Even when the Internet appears to be nostalgically churning through the cultural past, it’s still hunting for “old newness.” A familiar video clip from 1986 does not possess virility; what the medium desires is an obscure clip from 1985 that recontextualizes the familiar one. The result is a perpetual sense of now.

“With a genre like the country-blues, that shit got curated,” Petrusich says. “Specific people made specific choices about what would endure.

it’s impossible to generate deep verisimilitude without specificity.

“But what about the merit of these things? Shouldn’t we emphasize that? Isn’t merit the most reliable criteria for longevity?”

A key reason college football came into existence in the late nineteenth century was that veterans who’d fought in the Civil War feared the next generation of men would be soft and ill prepared for the building of a republic (“We gotta give these boys something to do,” these veterans believed. “Hell, they’ll probably go through life without killing

I’m simply wondering if the overall state of society is—very slowly, and almost imperceptibly—moving toward a collective condition where team sports don’t have a place. In other words, a distant future where football disappears, followed by every other sport with vaguely similar values.

The intermittent rebooting of normalcy in the years following 9/11.

fanbase resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves.

There is, certainly, something likable about this process: It’s nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it’s the weirdos who care the most.