Sports are a balm, always have been. Sports are an escape, always have been. We fill your gullet with stories of players going wrong, of stars who cheat, of fixed finishes, and still sports go merrily along in their well-supported fantasy world, impervious, barely connected to anything that occurs in real life, because that's the way we set it up in the first place.

And so the games must stop.

And then they must begin again. As soon as possible.

Don't be misled for a minute: There is no precedent for this. There is no precedent for what happened Tuesday in New York and Washington, because this is a different age altogether than the 1940s. And there is no precedent for determining how and when America's games and entertainment should go on for those same reasons. It's different now. Any presumption to the contrary is logically indefensible.

The question of when Major League Baseball shall resume, for example, is at this point almost purely hypothetical. It's such a secondary concern that one feels almost embarrassed to raise it -- and, on a practical level, much of the answer will be determined by such very ordinary factors as ability to travel, security of facilities and the like. This much is clear: Now is not the moment to be throwing 50,000 people into a stadium in a large city in the United States.

And so the games must stop. But, unquestionably, they must begin again. And the part about "as soon as possible" really gets to the heart of why anyone watches games at all.

On this new emotional terrain, nothing can qualify as particuarly ridiculous or particularly reasonable. Does baseball begin after two or three days away? A week? At this point, we're strictly picking numbers out of a hat. When the San Francisco Bay Area was rocked by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the World Series went into a week's suspension. Does a week even begin to cover things here?

The college football and NFL seasons are supposed to resume in just four days. Is that enough time? How can anyone possibly know? The one thing that feels certain, here in 2001, with planes crashing into the World Trade Center and simply blowing towers down, is that the moment at which Americans can collectively feel "safe" walking back into a huge edifice isn't going to arrive anytime soon. But at some point, the gates open anyway.

It needs to be quickly. It needs to be the first moment at which security officials say, "This is as much as we can cover it." The point is that sports are not life; sports are the relief from life. That relief is called for already, faintly, of course, but called for.

There is no accounting for every stadium and every arena and every facility in every city in the United States. There is nothing linear about this. The people in Kansas City may feel quite differently about walking back into their places of entertainment than the people in New York. There is no single timeline that is going to work unilaterally.

It's a giant nation, and it is a lot of games, and it feels vaguely inappropriate even to contemplate right now, and then pretty soon it will not feel so inappropriate. Because in the absence of being able to do anything about that dark bigger picture, America will collect itself one smaller snapshot at a time. A game is a snapshot, is all. Right now it doesn't seem like much.

And then it will.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.