Headline seen two weeks ago: "Japan's Women's Soccer Team's Success in the World Cup Lifts a Nation."

You might recall that Japan suffered horrendous tsunamis and earthquakes this past spring. Close to 30,000 people perished; some swept to sea and others crushed under falling infrastructure. Almost 140,000 were displaced. It was the worst kind of nightmare-as if there can be a good kind. I still get chills when I think of the passenger train that was found at the bottom of the ocean with its now dead human cargo still aboard.

On top of the gross human toll taken the day of the disaster, is the further human toll that will be taken when they finally sort out the economic impact of it all.

And a couple of weeks ago, their women's soccer team won a tournament...and it apparently "lifted" the nation. Like the Saints apparently "lifted" New Orleans when they won the Super Bowl a couple of years ago. Like baseball apparently "lifted" our country when it resumed after 9/11.

Coincidentally, I read this headline just today as I took a break from writing this article: "The Crimson Tide are Playing for a Higher Purpose."

That would be the Alabama Crimson Tide college football team. Their home, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, suffered raging killer tornadoes last month, and apparently the football team is going to make it better.

After detailing some really positive, practical work that the players and coaches were doing in the community, Steve Eubanks of Fox Sports pulls off this gem: "That will continue as the year unfolds. But the one thing they all know for sure? The best thing the Crimson Tide could do for the psyche of Tuscaloosa is to win."

Really? So winning a game is a higher calling than volunteering to help the suffering in the real world? Interesting philosophy.

To me this is all suffocating, delusional self-importance and cruel sanctimonious trivialization all at once.

Now, let me be clear, there is something to be said for entertainments and diversions in tough times. And I'm plenty pleased when these entertainers raise money for victims or actually lend a hand in the rebuilding.

But to claim the success of some team in a game as a defining moment for a community's recovery is as arrogant as it is self-serving and ridiculous.

Most people don't live and die by sports. For every one person glued to the Super Bowl-our most watched sporting event in the country by far-there are two people yawning and disinterested.

The sports world has an inflated opinion of itself. It lives in this cloistered fantasy world where all it sees is itself. And like all short-sighted self-serving agenda driven people and groups, it assumes that what is important to them surely must also be important to everyone else. I've never seen an industry that congratulates itself more. Well maybe Hollywood...and Donald Trump.

We like to simplify catastrophe by finding easy resolutions that make us feel better. We want to rush the healing process and get all the bad thoughts out of our heads as soon as we can. We'd prefer to get on with our lives and not have to face the continuing pain and work of real nation-lifting. And by this we trivialize the suffering.

As if anything truly heroic can happen in a game. I grew up a sports fan. But they simply aren't that important.

Remember, the Yankees lost the World Series a few months after 9/11, but somehow the real heroes in New York continued to work to heal the city. And it was five years after Katrina that New Orleans won their Super Bowl, but the proud and brave in New Orleans somehow soldiered on despite the losses.