There is always a group of death in any World Cup. And it's a complement in a way to be in a group of death because it means that you're a good team also.

FIFA is a vuvuzela. It's in your ear, but you don't want to hear it, and then eventually it goes away.

For good reasons, there are no ties during the Stanley Cup season. Somebody needs to win so the lads can get out to their cottages on the lakes, where all hockey players spend their summers, or so I have been told.

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.

I've seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I've seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.

War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.

To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.

All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.

Stanley Cup hockey comes around every year, when games start to count in multiples of best-of-seven series, and the players seem to put more attention into every pass, every check, every annoying little trick.

Weary soccer players just cannot run anymore and must resort to shootouts after 120 minutes when a result is mandatory, but men on skates can go indefinitely, no matter how badly it disrupts the television network's schedule.

I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.

I never watch 'Sopranos' reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that's how it ended for me.

Every spring, this happens: People discover hockey when daylight lasts longer and men grow beards and tie games do not end in shootouts but rather continue until a goal is scored. The seventh game only heightens the mood for players and fans alike.

It's a Stanley Cup thing. The boys mangle one another for a series, performing all kinds of nasty tricks, then they make nice, shaking soggy hands as the teams shuffle in opposite directions.

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

Fans all have their memories of pennant races, good memories, sick memories.

Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.

When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.

Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.

Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.

Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.

It is no fun lining up in your own building - as the hockey players say - and touching the hands of fellow stubbly louts who have just sent you off to the proverbial cabin on the lake.

Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.