First off, I need to come clean. I actually have no feelings whatsoever about kickball, it just never stuck. But some human activities have become so all consuming - or diverting - of media attention I’d guess unless you lived on a desert island you (and me) simply can’t avoid the spectacle of a bunch of sportspeople kicking a leather-ette bag toward another bunch of sportspeople and back, ad infinitum. 

As a result, switching on any device - be it a tv, radio, phone - or even venturing outside the house will bring you into contact with Global Sports of some form or other; and with it, the art of the sporting metaphor.

It maybe a lazy trope, but you can’t refute the power of ‘stick it in the back of the net’ to fire up the team. It set me to thinking, and to dip into the various Lakoff and Johnson editions I have to see how old the ‘life as sport’ metaphor is; and failing to find a definitive answer there (or at least not in seconds. Ah, fickle patience) to the interwebs.

Turns out, according to some sport isn’t top of league and that death (perhaps unsurprising) is at the top of metaphor premiership - unless, of course, you’re with Bill Shankly’s 1981 view that football’s more important than that. 

But he (and you’d) appear to be in august company. To the Stoics (ha! Of course) life was like a game (or sport. The language is naturally plastic after 2,500-odd years), and especially to a ball-game that sounds rather closer to Australian Rules Football that anything we see played out on Saturday terraces and cheered on by tap-room-toughs. 

Seems like all the key players of that philosophical team’s age indulged the idea of ‘playing ball’ and a game’s ability to substitute for life.

Not that this was new to them. Seems they were simply passing forward something Mesopotamia had already drawn - that sport is life and vice-versa. 

Given how long we’ve owned metaphorical goals, can’t be all that surprised when that call comes across the office - ‘on me ‘ead, son!’ - and we jump to play on.