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Shirley Leung

Imagine what we could accomplish if we weren’t debating Deflategate

Imagine what would happen if we put the National Football League in charge of the world economy.

Could we solve the gap between rich and poor? Could the middle class rise again? Could we eliminate homelessness?

I bring this up while thinking about how much brainpower grown men have expended on how to handle just one tiny aspect of the sport: game-day balls. They are inflated with precision to meet league requirements. A referee must inspect them, not one hour, not two hours, but two hours and 15 minutes before kickoff. A ball that passes muster gets a special marking, and for extra measure, at least one official touches the ball after every play.

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Inflation, deflation — not happening on their watch. Newborn babies should be so lucky to get this much cradling and coddling.

Imagine what would happen if the NFL was in charge of solving global warming.

Could we prevent seas from rising? Could we stop the icecaps from melting? Could we save the penguins?

Imagine what would happen if the NFL put as much attention on reducing domestic violence that’s committed by its players or on dealing with brain-injuring concussions.

Could we have an NFL that we can all be proud of?

When the Indianapolis Colts suspected the New England Patriots of playing with underinflated balls during Sunday’s playoff game, the NFL inspected each of the Patriots’ 12 game balls — not once but twice at halftime, and using not one but multiple pressure gauges.

The verdict: 11 were not properly inflated.

And we haven’t stopped talking, tweeting, and tweaking about deflategate since.

Imagine what would happen if we spent as much time talking about how we can get more kids to graduate from high school, or how we can get everyone to trust the police again, or how we can get Democrats and Republicans to end the gridlock in Washington.

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Imagine what would happen if we watched President Obama’s State of the Union address as eagerly as we tuned into Sunday’s championship game. The ratings for the two events, according to Nielsen, weren’t even close: 31.7 million viewers to 42.1 million.

Imagine what would happen if we talked about #blacklivesmatter as much as we do #deflategate.

What’s deflating is how much time we can spend on so much that doesn’t really matter. Only in America. Only in a place too privileged to know better.

I get it. It’s about catching cheaters. It’s about upholding the integrity of the game. It’s about fair play. It’s about piling on the team everyone outside of New England loves to hate.

But ultimately it’s about how sports is an escape. It’s much easier to go on about the hot air in footballs than to deal with cold facts of life — how a surgeon gets murdered in his own hospital, how journalists get gunned down by terrorists in their own offices, how bombs get set off at our own Boston Marathon.

We obsess over something as inconsequential as the size of a football because we can make sense of it all. Teams tinker with balls to help them win games. It’s something everyone has an opinion on.

“The problem of underinflating balls is relatively easy to solve. You put a little more in,” said Ben Shields, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management who has written two books on the business of sports. “The other societal problems are much more complex.”

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That’s deep, but not as much as this.

“Another reason why fans take events like deflategate so seriously is because sports is a part of our identity. If there is an attack on our favorite team, it can often be an attack on ourselves,” Shields added. “Sometimes we only like to grapple with problems when they affect us personally in a very relevant and immediate way.”

Imagine what we could accomplish if we spent as much time on what really matters as we do on football.

Too bad we can only imagine.


Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.