YouTube must be the mother of all rabbit holes when it comes to the internet.

Screened in over 200 countries, Super Bowl will be lapped up by well over 100 million Americans for whom it has become as symbolic of their country as Apple Pie.

The National Basketball Arena in Tallaght, tucked away down a nondescript laneway just off the M50, is a quaint kind of building for a place only turning 21 this year.

Much has been made about Jose Mourinho’s penchant for functional football during — and in the time between — his two spells at Chelsea but any lack of ambition to be found at Stamford Bridge, where they face Manchester United on Sunday, is far more endemic among the visiting ranks.

It’s almost 13 years since a basketball club was founded in the Carlow village of Ballon to cater for recreational female players aged 30 or over.

Watching the excellent ‘Feile Dreams’ documentary last Monday, it seemed, at first, extraordinary to think coaches of Irish birth or descent could actually go and sell the game of Gaelic football to a group of kids born and raised in London, most of whose roots are traced back to Africa rather than Achill, Athlone or Annascaul.

Be that as it may, millennia of faith has already been observed so it seems likely we will continue to see a blurring of the lines between religion and sport.

Turn on your TV for any length of time this next few weeks and sooner or later you are likely to be treated to recorded moments of rare magic

Sports stadiums can be drab places long after the final whistle has blown, when all that humanity has trickled away into the surrounding streets and countryside and left behind are the memories, the cold and the detritus of a day well spent.

From mediocrity to systems failure and, finally, heroism.