I’ll tell you this now: you will never get me to go to a sports game. You could beg. I don’t imagine you would, but you could, and it would make no difference. I am stone on this point, there is not one pixel of a chance you could manage to stir another smaller thing’s worth of interest out of me if sport is in any way involved.

Last night I read ten “Sports Night” scripts.

And that’s on top of the ten I read earlier in the week.

And that’s on top of the fact that I know I’ve read them all before, plus I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if I’ve read them five times. Especially since I know I watched the whole two seasons of this Aaron Sorkin comedy in a binge before there were binges. And I’ve binged at least a couple of times since.

I’ve thought about this a lot and previously taken some shade in the fact that one advertising line for the show ran: “Sports Night. It’s about sports. The way Charlie’s Angels is about law enforcement.” So the way a sports show had got me engaged was not really by being a sports show.

Only, reading all of the available scripts again, I think it was. At least in the details as it’s about the people making a sports TV show and there is constant references to statistics I don’t know, people I’ve not heard of, even sports I can’t imagine are actually sports but there you go.

What I want to know is what got me over that line into watching a series with sport in its very title. And I know that the answer is Aaron Sorkin. I have never once watched a series or a film because of the actors in it, nor because of who directed it. But I have often watched because of the writer and that’s what happened here, long back in the day when the show was new and DVDs weren’t old.

But what this means is that I what I think I really want to know is what else I am missing out on because of whatever blinkers I’m wearing today. I like that, as a man, I’m expected to diss romances when actually I like them enormously and will at a moment’s notice bore you into shrapnel over how identical I think romances and thrillers are.

Thrillers. That’s another thing a man of my age is expected to like, and this time I do. I understand that I’m expected to be riveted to whole channels devoted to the history of Nazis and the Knights Templar, but not so much, no.

I don’t care what other people expect me to like, but I am coming to care very much about what I expect myself to enjoy, and what I’m failing to appreciate because of it. I’ve not given opera a go, for instance. I mean, listening, not performing. I call myself multilingual because I speak English, American, Australian, and am learning Canadian. But I don’t try to learn anything else.

I don’t ever try manga or comic books. I don’t try video games. I have tried TikTok twice, when I needed to write something about it and of course had to at least have looked to see it, even if both times it chose to present me first with some rather disturbing videos. That was a case of an algorithm confidently predicting what I’d like, and I really, really didn’t.

But then no algorithm would tell you that I could be a fan of Francisca Valenzuela, whose chiefly pop music has not charted in the UK as far as I know, and as far as her Chilean lyrics would suggest.

I found her music on a rare exploration. I found Sports Night because the writer pulled me over the line.

I’ve got to look around more. There is so much to enjoy, and right now there’s so much to take refuge in.

But I’ve done enough sports now.