What role can sports play in overcoming and confronting grief?

Every day, a team wins and a team losses.

Every day, someone is lost from this earth and on to the next spiritual landing spot.

I am so sorry for your loss.

And yet, no one apologizes when your favorite team loses their game.
Those two events are, in fact, tremendously different.  But if sports has taught me anything -- and I mean, anything -- it is that life moves on.  Even after a toss loss, there's another game to be played.  Did you have a bad game?  You have to dust yourself off and get ready for the next one.  There is very little time to sit and mope.  Better yet, it's a matter of finding the right time and place to do that; after all, it's only healthy to do so.  But we must also prepare ourselves to get ready for the next game and the next practice.  We must take active steps as a response to losses and negative events.

We recently lost a loved one and I'm not here to say sports somehow resolved the sadness and grief.  It didn't.  But following sports has conditioned me to grieve a little differently.  This time around, I turned grief to action.  I wrote letters, I reached out, I took active steps in the process towards my own emotional and spiritual recovery.  In sports, nothing is really going to just magically come to you.  You have to be in the right time and place, of course, but being in the right time and place is preceded by a particularly significant amount of hard work and dedication.

I recognize that every grieving process is different.  But for me, putting my grief into action was the best thing for me to resolve those feelings.  Because the next game is every moment; if you're not moving your life in a position direction, then what are you doing with it?