This was the day to scold Michael Jordan, to tell him to face reality. This was the day to tell Colorado running back Marcus Houston to grow up, for Gary Barnett to get a grip. This was the day to rebuke the Avalanche for wandering off to Scandinavia, stupidly distancing themselves from Denver, the day to wonder how many Swedes were hanging off Denver lightpoles screaming to see the Stanley Cup.

This was to be a day like all days in sports, silly and crucial, full of choices for smug columnists, full of folderol and fans full of themselves, happy and angry, eager to defend Barry Bonds as well as Sonny Lubick.

It was not that day. It was the worst day. It was the day that everything changed.

Back here in sports, back behind the horrific pictures and accounts of death and destruction, of the most horrible day in America, we are safe. And we are more important than ever. We are needed because we are not needed at all.

We are the toy department, so said a crotchety old columnist named Jimmy Cannon. We are the place, so said a chief justice of the United States, the place where man’s triumphs are recorded and not his failures.

There is only some truth in any of that. This is where we call a coach an idiot and let irony carry the tone. This was the day to write the anti-idiot column and call the Colorado State coach a genius for winning a football game and see if anyone gets the joke this time.

That’s the column to write today. This was the lead, already written. “Michael Corleone allowed one question about his business and I will allow one about mine.” Mockery comes easy when the stakes are hollow.

Oh, we can be very taken with our own cleverness, we columnists. We get to stir a world that doesn’t matter, provoke opinion from vapors. None of this matters, never has, never will, and that is exactly why it does.

We are the distraction. We are the relief. Reality should always be as harmless as Michael Jordan’s ego, his boredom, his pugnacity, his desire to get out of the house, whatever it is that seems now to force Jordan to mess with our memory of him.

That’s the column to write. How dare Jordan do that to us, to ruin the perfect ending, the last shot, to win the last game, to become just another creaky schlub who can’t face tomorrow or dribble drive like he used to.

And Houston, the young man in Boulder being abused by an insensitive coach. Words sting. Try 110 stories of rubble.

Grow up, grow old, what precious and welcome commands to anyone still buried under the ruins of the World Trade Center.

In sports all of the wars are phony, all of the violence voluntary, the greatest ego no more dangerous than the length of an arm.

This was the day to look for cracks in the Broncos, now McCaffreyless, to take the temperature of poor Olandis Gary, suddenly saving his own seat behind Mike Anderson and Terrell Davis, through no fault of his own.

We ache for the innocence of just yesterday when disagreement over who starts at running back for the Broncos can consume an evening and ruin a meal.

Whine, Mark McGwire, that you are injured and should be stepping along side Bonds, homer for homer. That’s what to write. How foolish can be a man whose pride pushes the irrational? That question should only be asked in sports.

Sure, if Bonds had McGwire to pressure him, or if Bonds had to break a 37-year-old record instead of one barely three seasons young, how much harder would it be? These are the questions to fight over.

May an athlete’s arrogance always be laughable. Please. It is the arrogance of tyrants that is treacherous.

Sports will stop, as sports should. You do not cheerlead at funerals. There is time to mourn, to grieve, to applaud and cherish the real courage and great sacrifice of the human spirit. Baseball took a week after the ’89 earthquake. No less should be taken for terrorism.

Football should not be played this weekend, not college, not pro. And maybe the Avalanche blundered into something, safe off there in Sweden.

That’s the column to write. Tell sports to step back and let the emergency vehicles through, give the mourners space and the avengers encouragement. But do not go too far.

The world is too hard without you.