Sports is the release, and that's one of the hard parts. The hard part is in realizing that the release won't serve today, or tomorrow, or this week.

Next week? When next week comes, we'll see.

	Payne Stewart's parking spot at the Tour Championship became a makeshift memorial.

From Payne Stewart straight on through to Greg Moore and Walter Payton, this was, for sports, the week that was. It isn't often that they pull back the curtain and make it clear to everyone that it's a human enterprise fraught with the same peril as just about every other human enterprise -- and when it does happen, it immediately becomes once too often an occurrence.

Then twice too often.

After that, too much, period.

Sports is the release, and that's the hard part. You don't log on to ESPN.com or pick up the sports section of your newspaper looking to have your life's view complicated or implicated, and neither do I. Very occasionally, sports is reflective of or a contributor to some broad social movement. Far more often, sports is, to the mass of the world that comes to it, some box scores, a nice little athletic drama and a decent quote or two.

This past week, sports was literally life and death. When the Lear jet carrying Stewart and five other passengers veered eerily off-course, cut across the heartland of the United States and crashed in South Dakota, it was a staggering reminder of something we already knew but weren't planning to acknowledge anytime soon: Sports precludes nothing, not even the intervention of the fates.

Payne Stewart died, which was shocking and tragic. You know what else was shocking? Payne Stewart had a family -- a wife and two beautiful children. How often do we even think of our sports stars as people living lives outside of their venues? I remember, when Arthur Ashe died, being so awestruck by the grace and composure with which his widow carried herself. The thing was, before then, I wasn't even aware Ashe was married.

And sports is the release in part because of that, because of the insular nature of it. The games arrive; you watch. You cheer, you boo, you curse and throw stuff if you're an idiot. Then, you are done with it. These people, the players, were the entertainment; it wasn't necessary to know more about them than the facts of what they did on the field or the court, unless it served to further the entertainment factor.

Isn't Colin Montgomerie a caricature? Isn't Michael Irvin a human dartboard? Isn't it easier living in a black-and-white world?

But Payne Stewart had a family. And Greg Moore's parents and girlfriend were at the CART race track in Fontana, Calif., on Sunday when Moore's car slammed into a wall at 220 mph, killing the 24-year-old Canadian. Payton died suffering from primary sclerosing cholangitis, which had him awaiting a liver transplant to save his life. And Paul O'Neill played in the Yankees' clinching game of the World Series hours after his father died -- played through a devastating personal loss.

And Mark Thomas, the Indianapolis Colts' defensive end who lay motionless on the field for nearly 10 minutes after absorbing a brutal-looking concussion during a game against the Cowboys -- he goes home, once he leaves the hospital, to some life with which we aren't even vaguely familiar. His life -- that's the thing.

And Payton, in relative privacy occasionally interrupted by the public's "right to know," finally lost his battle Monday.

That's sports, the great national narcotic, soother of pains. I have seen people in the throes of tremendous personal despair nevertheless sit down before a television and almost mechanically dial up a football game, as though so doing might restore a semblance of normalcy to their rocked worlds.

Usually it works; sometimes it doesn't. Early Sunday morning, three Syracuse football players were stabbed during a melee outside a bar on the city's south side. One of the players was left with stab wounds near his heart.

Somewhere, in some recess, there is a sports fan reading about their story who reflexively wonders what that'll do to the Orangemen's chances next week.

Sports is the release. Sooner or later, it will be again.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.