If life were a stereo system, sports and entertainment would be TREBLE and such factors as health, education and family would fall under BASS. This metaphor may strike you as overly simplistic -- idiotic even -- but the point here is that to strike a perfect balance, you need to maintain both. Unfortunately, there is no sensory notch to feel for every morning to know if you're living with too much of one or the other.

The events of September 11, 2001, didn't exactly restore our lives to balance, but they did force us to reach for our internal dial. The tinny sounds of sports got turned down. Stuff we took for granted -- the sound of a fire engine, the questions of a child -- we turned up. And for a while, it felt right.

	In the year since 9/11, professional athletes started listening to the fans.

What felt wrong were the constant calls for a return to normalcy, as if the world before 9/11 were a perfect place that didn't need to change much beyond a touchup here or a new window treatment there. That's the world, by the way, that gave us Martha Stewart, Kenneth Lay and Hootie Johnson. Ridin' high a year ago, taken to task in 2002. September 11 wasn't the end of irony, but it may have marked the end of bull----.

Much has been written about the shift in heroism from athletes to uniformed personnel, and much of it is true. We honored our quarterbacks too much and our quartermasters too little. And to their credit, the athletes saw that. Long after the Mets and Yankees stopped wearing NYPD and FDNY hats, the players of our games were willing to transfer their nobility to the providers of our safety. Pat Tillman even shifted his career. As for those athletes and owners who didn't get it, who whined about their pay or their operating losses, they had their complaints thrown back at them like opposing home run balls at Wrigley.

We had the feeling, for the first time in a long time, that they, our exalted poobahs of sports, were listening. If there had been a strike, who the hell knows what it would have been about? The settlement -- that was about the two sides gauging the interests and possible disinterest of the public.

We told them, the jocks, that they weren't the only heroes around -- and they heard us. We asked them to change, not to think so much about the almighty dollar -- and they did.

Now it's our turn to change. While you can feel this new awareness on the part of the jockocracy, you don't get the sense that the "faithful" are any less forgiving or any more thoughtful. I'm not just talking about Angels fans throwing things on the night before the strike. I'm also talking about the general tenor of the conversation on sports radio or the chatter online. On the one hand, we're telling ourselves that sports is no longer life and death. On the other hand, we're calling for the head of Bobby Valentine, who just won a humanitarian award for his work with the families of 9/11 victims. Cowboys fans: Before you get a grip on Dave Campo, get a grip on yourselves.

Sports is just not that important.

What it is, though, is necessary.

That little truth hit home to me last February at the annual gathering of Strat-O-Matic fans in Glen Head, Long Island, for the release of the new baseball cards. Talk about treble: These were people devoted to a dice baseball game.

But alongside the line to the office door was a table with a makeshift Strat-O-Matic stadium, set up by a woman and her two children. She was Katrina Marino, and her husband, Kenneth J. Marino, was one of the firefighters lost in the World Trade Center cataclysm.

The game was his way of finding a balance.

Steve Wulf is executive editor of ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at steve.wulf@espnmag.com.