It doesn't come from the pen of a writer, the training of an actor, the oratory of a politician. We have realised the sweetness of that addiction. It's a wonder governments haven't outlawed it.

The pity is that we are losing the make-believe quality. We are growing savvy and cynical and we're swamped in cheats, cutting our way through trumped-up competitions made for the pleasure of TV executives. Is there a thesis written yet on the nonsense that is the Champions League? Chelsea are champions of what exactly?

We have ourselves to blame. Somewhere along the way we were startled by sport's capacity for selling things. That access which athletes provide to the marketplace has emancipated them and enslaved the rest of us. We are all a deal away from the pitiful fate of rugby league which sold its soul, its history and its future.

Footballers, bless them, once toiled under the Dickensian harshness of the minimum wage. Good men busted them free and once, for a split second back when George Best was a teenager, every soccer player was paid close to what he was worth. Now our heroes are in orbit above us. They live in bubbles. We are the germs they pay to keep out. From Isleworth, Florida, to Southport, Liverpool, people who are paid to sweat live in little communities of their peers. What does it mean? Who knows. It isn't good, though. Our heroes, they have hypochondria of the ego. They can detect a pea of criticism under the mile high pile of mattresses which we have stacked for them.

How did we get so out of whack that to be captain of the Irish soccer team means not stopping for two minutes to convey via the press your feelings about the latest success or failure? How did we get into a world where Hasselbainks, Collymores and Van Hooydonks advertise their misery with such gauche aplomb? We find a drug cheat and say "Sure, everyone is doing it", rather than weeping at a world where people will destroy their lives just for sport.

I am just old enough to remember when sport was rarely seen on television. Rations came in black and white and the announcer would advise that "Leeds are the team in the lighter-coloured shirts".

I'd go back to that world tomorrow. Soccer coming in glimpses. Match of the Day just a rumour as Gay Byrne flowered on RTE. The Big Match on ITV at lunchtime on Sunday, doing just enough to convey the notion that it was the downmarket version of something else.

I'd go back. Television has delivered sport into an era of frightening, monolithic homogenity. Soccer, itself a game of immense beauty, has imperialistic pretensions now. Soccer will not be happy until Americans lay down their baseball mitts, Australians put away their footie vests and Cork-men lay down their hurleys. Soccer won't be happy until the programming execs come out with their hands up chanting all soccer all the time.

Television has changed the way we view sport. If it ain't the NBA, it ain't hoops. National League soccer is what it is, but because it doesn't look like proper soccer (as seen on TV!) we push the plate away. What town is worthy of the name unless it has a Hard Rock cafe and a major league professional sports outfit? Sam? Sam Hamman. Where art thou?

In our own garden the GAA has survived like a wonder of the world. Hardy, conservative, infuriating, determinedly homespun, part of what we bloody well are etc. Unexplainable. To see a wee kid in a Manchester United PLC jersey is to see a depressing example of cause and effect. Get your kid to root for Microsoft why don't ya. To see little ones toting hurleys about the place, pucking balls, imagining themselves illuminating Croke Park, well, that's different. You can park the car and gaze at them for 20 minutes and wonder at the GAA.

It is a tribute to the association's influence that it rises our gorge as easily as it fires our dreams. What is the GAA?

Maddening. Gerry Adams and David Trimble sitting in government before the GAA allows RUC members to play football. Progressive. From nothing, up pops Croke Park and a necklace of solid facilities.

Home. Do the hairs not rise on your neck when you stand in Croke Park on a big day and the anthem plays and the hurlers below gaze at the flag?

The GAA goes gunning over the falls into the new century without a care. Love the games or hate the games, what we are left with here is a unique cultural asset, indigenous amateur sports which mean something, which mean a lot. Heroes who take buses.

Try explaining Brian Corcoran or Trevor Giles to an American. To an Englishman.

We could be selling these wonders to audiences everywhere, but the beauty of the GAA is its intimacy. Everything at the other end of the spectrum is vulgar.

Take the Olympics: the audacious scale of the celebration has brought the Games to the point where they defeat their own purpose. They celebrate business first, chemistry second, television third, and sport last.

In Atlanta, buses wandered around the concrete ribbons of highway. Utterly lost. Everyone looked lost. The scale of what was unfolding was too big. American television took to telling romantic micro-stories about the big stars and then broadcasting their events virtually live. The rest was fat. Trimmed fat. From the cliff-top above the executive boxes the figures below streaked past breaking records and breaking hearts. They were as remote as Tibet.

Sydney, the portal of the new millennium, will be wondrous surely. The city is riddled with beauty and the boisterous hubris of the hosts will ensure an event freckled with wonder and good memories. Believing in what unfolds will be harder.

Drugs have become the stinking trough of sport. I remember sitting up somewhere in flatland to watch Ben Johnson beat Carl Lewis, arrogant insufferable Carl Lewis. The epoch-defining thrill of it. The big surly Jamaican-Canadian exploding from the television. The last innocent moment.

Three failed drug tests later and Johnson's cheating has spanned the breadth of our disillusionment. We know now that the harsh words about the East Germans and the Russians weren't sour grapes. We know the needle and the damage done. We know now that we can grow our own brass-necked cheats.

You pause sometimes. Sport versus reality. On the day of the shootings in Loughinisland we were in Giants Stadium, New York, watching Paul McGrath subdue Italians. After Omagh we were in Croke Park. After the Shankill Road bombing we were at a league game. Where is the perspective? Is it grotesque to watch men play games when other men's bodies are twisted and mangled and grieved over?

You announce that sport is affirmation and celebration, the very pinnacle of human interaction. It isn't that any more, but it is a thread of life, a step forward every day. The last place where you can ask for, if not expect, a little truth.

For that moment when sport sweeps you up in its web, you put your hands over your ears and forget about what ails sport. Cheats. Greed. Bad guys and spivs.

Something out there will always bring you back, sport will always annex the imagination if you let it. Imagine the excitement when New Yorker Gertrude Ederle, 19, swam the English channel in 1926, when Fred Quimet won the US Open at his local course in Brookline, Boston, walking home each evening to have tea with his parents, when Babe Ruth hit the home run just where he said he'd hit it, when Dublin beat Kerry in 1977.

We head off from the shallow end of the new century, prisoners on our own amusement float. The internet and TV pin us to our solitary confinement cells. Sport is bigger than us now, we struggle for an angle from which to view it, but we need it more than ever. Its humanity, its warmth, its wanton contact with other people.

Someone will emerge, an Ali, a Pele, a Ring. One genuine article in the new century and we will be lost again. It's been a great ride.