Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that he always turned to the sports pages of the newspapers first: the sports pages were about humanity's victories, the front page mostly about its failures.
All but the most historic games are forgotten almost instantly, and even the most historic games have a very limited cultural life.
How many people care what happened in baseball in 1971 - never mind 1921?
Meanwhile those people are still reliant on applications of quantum theory, which was first described in 1900, even if they're not aware why it matters to them.
The bigger problem with sports is they encourage superficial tribalism and even racism.
This was very obvious in the UK during and after the Brexit debate. Vocal Brexiters seemed to think "winning" and "losing" were a team event, and most - especially those with football team flags on their Facebook profiles - literally didn't seem able to understand that there would be hard consequences for the country as a whole which went far beyond the immediate result.
But it just highlights that team sports are light entertainment dressed up as something more admirable.
If the media wanted to skew the balance they could concentrate more on individual amateurs.
Someone who goes from barely being able to run to a marathon is going to have an interesting and inspiring story. I'd be more interested in hearing about that kind of victory than the weekly/annual filler round of Famous Team A vs Famous Teams B-Z.
Wrong scale. Think smaller by several orders of magnitude. Think the daily life of someone with a dead end job, a wife they hate, and two awful kids. If their local team wins, that's a great victory by proxy. A victory to crow about with mates, a victory to tolerate a kid's failing grades, a victory to stoke the old love machine. We're tribal pack hunting monkeys. If our tribe wins, we win. And winning, of any kind, feels great.