It was one of those dunks that briefly knocks the world off its hinges. Shaedon Sharpe stole the outlet pass just outside the 3-point line. He took one casual dribble toward the paint. Then the Trail Blazers’ young guard rose slowly into the air, cocked his arm back like the arm of a catapult, and threw down a one-handed jam of such comprehensive violence that the Wizards’ Justin Champagnie—who tried, bless his heart, to defend the shot—disintegrated into little streaks of light, like someone beaming aboard on Star Trek.
I mean, look at these utter shenanigans:
I watched this moment a few minutes after it happened, when it popped up on my Bluesky feed. I wasn’t watching the game, and I didn’t turn the game on after I saw it. Instead, I wore out the replay button on the clip of the dunk itself. I posted about the dunk four separate times. For a short but fun segment of my evening, my life revolved around this dunk. I have no idea what the final score was or even who won the game.
In sports, as in most areas of culture, we’re living in the age of moments. Being a sports fan used to mean caring primarily about games and their outcomes: Two teams would meet, and you’d watch them play to find out who would win. Highlights, when they happened, were an added bonus, but they weren’t the main thing. You didn’t separate them from the context in which they took place because the game itself was what mattered—the game and the season, which spanned a beginning, a middle, and an end, all of which were important to follow. Sports came with built-in stakes, and your engagement, as a fan, was mostly aligned with those stakes.
I think most of us would still say, if pressed, that who will win is the biggest question in sports. But 25 years into the 21st century, fewer and fewer of us act like it. More and more of us organize our experience of sports around smaller and smaller units: clips, reels, factoids, tweets, data points.
A dunk like Sharpe’s used to reach you during the flow of the game you were watching, and if you saw it out of context—say, on a SportsCenter highlights roundup—it felt incomplete. You were watching one scene of a movie whose plot you knew nothing about. These days, though? The dunk is the movie. The beginning, the middle, and the end are the stolen pass, the dribble, and the jam. It finds you on your phone, it goes whizzing through your feeds, and you stream it while looking at three other things simultaneously. You and your friends text it to each other. You remix it as a meme. And while it would be an exaggeration to say that the built-in stakes of sports no longer matter, the moment that’s experienced in this way feels strangely separate from them. There’s nothing unsatisfying or incomplete about the highlight by itself.
This isn’t a sports-specific phenomenon, but sports are a fascinating place to see it in action because in theory sports are so tied to the unfolding of events in real time that they should have been immune to it. Live sports, after all, are still the most valuable content in the cable and streaming universe. ESPN can charge carriage fees dozens of times higher than the average TV network because, for people who want to watch live sports, there’s still no easy alternative to the channels that broadcast them. If I want to binge Battlestar Galactica, I can enjoy the show years after it went off the air, probably via a $7/month ad-supported subscription to a streaming service called, I assume, Flinx, or perhaps Twervee. If I want to watch the Super Bowl live? I’ve gotta watch the Super Bowl live, and pay TV remains the easiest, though not the only, solution.
And I did watch the Super Bowl live! Or anyway, I watched it the way I watch most things these days: while skimming posts about the game, and while skimming posts about things other than the game, and while posting about the game, and while looking up whether it’s true that Russians can’t see blue, and I think Instagram showed me a dead frog at one point, and if anything worth seeing happened on the field, I could tell from the rising pitch of the announcers’ voices, and I glanced up in time to see the replay.
But why am I describing this to you? You already know it. You watched the game in exactly the same way, unless you were at a party, in which case you probably still looked at your phone every 15 seconds. And I mean … you kind of want to look at something else right now, don’t you? You just read eight paragraphs! You need a change of pace. Heard, chef! Here’s Lizbeth Ovalle rewriting the law of gravity last week:
Again, this goal happened last week. I’ve watched it one billion times. I have no idea who won that game, either.
We’re living in the age of moments. This is probably the biggest shift in our relationship to sports in the past quarter century. And what’s fascinating about this shift isn’t so much whether it’s “good” or “bad” or “irrefutable evidence that the internet drove a monster truck through the plate glass of our brains.” What’s fascinating is that the sports viewership model has changed in a way that would seem antithetical to the nature of sports viewership itself, but without sports thereby losing any of their perceived importance or urgency. NBA ratings are in free fall, but you’d never have known it from the way the Luka trade resonated across the culture; paying full attention to an actual game from start to finish is an increasingly difficult chore, but the collective freak-out that follows an amazing goal or an improbable touchdown is louder than ever.
And this, in turn, suggests something I find a lot more intriguing than the idea that being online has destroyed our attention spans or whatever. It suggests that we’re capable of finding new ways to engage with sports—I mean ways outside the built-in win-lose stakes that kept us glued to our TVs for half a century. What if it turns out that there’s a whole other way to do this? What if, instead of standing at the decadent end point of spectatorship, we’re feeling our way into something totally new?
A Few Favorite Sports Moments
It’s hard to feel sanguine about this possibility when you frame it in terms of broader culture shifts in entertainment and politics. If a dunk flying across my feed is the equivalent of a headline surfaced by the algorithm, and the game I’m not watching is the equivalent of the article I don’t click through to read, then yeah, that seems ominous.
But let’s stick to sports, for once in our lives. It occurs to me that the other transformative change of the past 25 years is probably the increasing tendency of fans to think like GMs. In 1990, say, I doubt that most fans knew anything about how contracts were structured, and I doubt that most fans during that era could have named a single sports agent. Our understanding of stats mostly topped out at shooting percentage and RBI. But these days, we’re living in an era of obsessive, nonstop trade speculation. We know everything there is to know about cap structure and expiring contracts. We sit around in bars chatting about the relative merits of xwOBA and FIP. We construct our fantasy teams with more care and precision than went into building actual 1970s title contenders.
Which seems totally opposed to everything I just said about the rise of the moment, right? One is visceral, immediate, and lazy—I don’t have to know anything to watch a dude juke his defender into outer space—and the other requires a PhD’s worth of abstract knowledge. But the two tendencies do have something pretty fundamental in common, which is that they’re both far more interactive than traditional sports fandom. The advantage of the moment may be less that it’s short and more that you can do something with it—share it, memeify it, add a caption to it, etc. And GM thinking is similar; it lets you construct trade scenarios (rather than just read about trades in the news), sort rosters, disassemble and reassemble teams around your own analytical priorities.
So maybe I’m just an optimist, but it’s possible that the sports moment isn’t totally analogous to the political sound bite. If it’s part of the larger TikTokification of society, maybe it has more to do with the creativity TikTok nurtures at its best than with the mindless scrolling it encourages at its worst. Maybe we’re making up our own viral dances with sports more than we’re being brainwashed by wellness influencers. As fans, we’re always looking for more excitement, more beauty, and less boredom, and a great moment can certainly give it to us. But maybe a great moment can also give us a little of what athletes get every time they play in a game. It can give us something to do.
