As soon as she heard that the aeroplanes that brought down the World Trade Centre had been hijacked from Boston on Tuesday morning, my sister Rebecca e-mailed me to make sure I hadn't been on one of them.

"If so," she added pleasantly, "I guess you won't reply." I wasn't, but I was supposed to fly from Boston to New York yesterday morning. The Marriott Hotel, into which I was booked is (or was) located, literally, in the shadow of the World Trade Centre, between the two towers, and masses of debris crashed onto it after the first tower collapsed.

One spends a lot of time on planes in this business - just last weekend a fellow member of the sportswriting fraternity told me over breakfast that his son's first complete sentence had been: "Daddy go airport" - and as I passed through security on my way to board a flight to the next day's football game in Cincinnati on Saturday afternoon, the operative in charge of the machine insisted on confiscating my cigarette lighter.

Now, people who wind up working airport security in America generally do so because they're unqualified to flip burgers at McDonald's, and I vainly attempted to point out that FAA regulations forbid packing lighters in one's checked baggage, not on one's person. This guy and his supervisor insisted that the rules had changed. Rather than argue the point and chance missing my plane I let them keep the damned thing, but that's not the point.

The point is that less than three days after they took away my lighter, these same geniuses allowed at least five Arabs with knives in their hand luggage to walk through security and board the two West Coast-bound planes that were used to destroy the World Trade Centre.

I may end up in New York before this week is over anyway. Although virtually every scheduled sporting event in America was cancelled on Tuesday, at this moment Don King still hasn't pulled the plug on Saturday night's world middleweight championship fight between Felix Trinidad and Bernard Hopkins. And, with 19,000 tickets sold in advance, unless somebody holds a gun to his head he may not.

On November 24th, 1963, two days after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the National Football League went ahead and played its full complement of Sunday afternoon games. The NFL's legendary commissioner Pete Rozelle would later concede that the decision to do so had been the greatest mistake of his career.

This time, with no NFL games scheduled to be played before Sunday, any decision has been held in abeyance, but midweek sporting events were brought to an abrupt halt by Tuesday's events. Major League Baseball cancelled its slate of games that night. Major League Soccer postponed all four games scheduled to be played last night, and the Nike Cup women's soccer match between the US and Japan was also postponed.

The first round of the World Golf Championship in St Louis was also postponed. My daughter's high school cross-country meet was even cancelled. But the fight? "I can't get to a phone right now," a publicist for the event e-mailed me Tuesday evening, "but I can tell you that right now the only decision that has been made is that there is no press conference tomorrow."

Now, you might suppose that there was no pre-fight press conference yesterday because they were still digging bodies out of the rubble in Manhattan, but you'd be at best half-right. There was no press conference primarily because The World's Greatest Promoter was still in Cleveland, his plane grounded until the nation's airports began functioning again.

At the moment Madison Square Garden has been evacuated. (City officials had contemplated pressing the arena into service as an emergency triage centre before opting for the Javits Centre instead.) There will be those who will argue that cancelling or postponing Saturday night's event would merely play into the hands of the terrorists who wrought the carnage.

We are a nation of record-keepers and statisticians, and when the final figures are in, Tuesday's totals will surely be an American record.

However, unless I don't know my colleagues as well as I think I do, within the next couple of days somebody is going to wonder aloud how Barry Bonds' assault on the all-time major league home run record will be diminished if the postponed games aren't made up. And somebody else will ask Michael Jordan how the week's events have affected his comeback plans.

Although an arena with 19,000 people jammed into a square block surely represents an inviting terrorist target, some would use President Bush's message ("These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve") as a pretext for arguing that this weekend's events should proceed as scheduled, even if in a somewhat abbreviated format - Trinidad and Hopkins are safely in place in New York, although several of the undercard fighters, including the participants in two other world title bouts, had not yet arrived before the airports were closed on Tuesday.

In the meantime, we as a nation may be forced to re-assess our priorities over the longer haul. Surely some will wonder, sensibly, whether it makes a lot of sense to put upwards of 50,000 people in football stadiums all over the country in the present climate, and, almost before you can say "Let The Games Begin" - exactly 21 weeks from today, as a matter of fact - the Winter Olympics are scheduled to commence in Salt Lake City, posing a logistical security nightmare if ever there was one.

The US Secret Service - the brilliant strategists who had Air Force One hop-scotching all across the country on Tuesday - are theoretically in charge of that security operation, and the bill had been pegged at upwards of $200 million even before this week's events.

One is forced to wonder: at what point does it become no longer worthwhile? Clearly, our lives will never be the same.