THE SPIRIT WILL NEVER...    It always feels weird at times like this, when there's so much uncertainty and sorrow in our living rooms and in our streets. .... Getting fired up for a football game seems so small and meaningless when you can flip the channel and see the kind of suffering we always assumed happened someplace else.    At times of national crisis, the same discussion always arises about the significance of things that can seem so trivial in the face of the things that really matter. I'm not here to defend sports. There are days, random days not just when tragedy strikes, when I marvel that I get paid to do this for a living, to analyze, criticize and praise athletes who get more fame and fortune than any teacher, firefighter, police officer or soldier could ever dream.    We are becoming a more diverse society by the day. More sophisticated. More cynical. More fearful. Yet there is something about sports that galvanizes and unites us in ways few things can. That's why the highest rated television show every year is the Super Bowl, why there are more children playing Little League now than at any time in its history, why there are as many sports networks as cable news channels and more fans going to more games than ever before.    It's hard not to sound trite, melodramatic and overwrought when you're trying to put things in perspective, but 10 years from now, the result of this weekends' college football games will be meaningless. The fact that they were played, though, won't be.    Remember the effect the New York Yankees had on the people of the Big Apple following 9/11? How major league baseball continued to play during World War II even as its best players were drafted and sent into harm's way? How the kids on the Charlotte High football team of Punta Gorda, Florida, played their season last fall after Hurricane Charley wiped out their school? Life needed to go on. That's why we play even as our sons and brothers, wives and mothers, fight in Iraq. They need to know the freedom they're risking their lives to defend is being exercised one touchdown at a time.    The same goes for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. They could care less about the Saints or LSU right now. But eventually, this will pass. It has to. And in a small way, simply knowing their teams, their fields and their lives will be there whenever, if ever, they get back to "normal" in the future can provide its own form of solace.    There was an interview with a woman who was handling her two small children in the Astrodome in Houston. She was reading them a bedtime story, even though their beds were cots on the floor of an old football stadium next to 11,000 strangers. The mother talked about trying to keep things as normal as possible, from making sure her kids brushed their teeth to saying their prayers before they fell asleep.    It's what they're used to, she said. It calmed them down.    Sports can do the same thing. It can remind people there's a life worth getting back to, that the lights will eventually come back on Friday nights in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, that the children will play again and the Superdome will roar when the Saints come marching in.    Sports can be our security blanket. Now, it seems, we need them more than ever.