It’s amazing how much sports dictates people’s day-to-day lives, from high school athletics to the professional ranks. It’s almost like there’s two types of suns — the one the earth revolves around with 365 days and four climate seasons, and one that is also circular and tangible.

Not to dig too deep into astrophysics and astronomy, but if you don’t know how the sun came about, it happened after The Big Bang where the universe suddenly popped into existence. If I remember correctly from undergrad, the sun turned on through fission of hydrogen, carbon and other gasses. Once the temperature reached about 10 million Kelvin that’s when it “turned on” and became the glowing ball in the sky giving the Earth 24-hour days and seasons.

Within the calendar mentioned above, most people have another object at the center of their universe. For me, the sports calendar begins with the start of football season and ends with the NBA Finals. The Major League Baseball schedule is weird since its  starts in March and ends in late October. It starts during one NBA season and ends at the beginning of another, and right at the end of one NFL season and in the middle of the next. I like to call the overlapping of all three seasons an athletic eclipse.

Friday nights in Vicksburg, and pretty much everywhere in the south, have been reserved for attending your alma mater’s football games. As a writer, I’ve enjoyed being back in the Friday night atmosphere of high school football and amazed the season is already half over.

During basketball season is where things become a bit unorganized. Because basketball isn’t as demanding on a person’s body as football, games are played more frequently. High school games are generally played on Tuesdays and Fridays. College and NBA games are pretty much every day.

Running in the remainder of the sports calendar is Major League Baseball and its 162 regular season games, and filling in the “dog days of summer.”

Other sports help fill in the calendar like volleyball, swimming and tennis. I remember waking up at 3 a.m. to watch Serena Williams in the women’s final of the Australian Open last year.

Life would be a cold, dark place without the Sun, but Earth would be a lot colder without sports.

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Alex Swatson is a sports writer. He can be reached at 601-636-4545, Ext. 178, or via email at alex.swatson@vicksburgpost.com