Almost everyone who stops playing misses the physical act of playing the game. They may understand that their body is no longer able or that their lives have swung in ways that lead them to walk away, but anyone who has ever played must miss the sheer fun of a happy dressing room.

And there is nothing quite like the giddiness of such a dressing room on the first night back.

Even the most unlikely of potential victors — shots that are too distant merely to be called long ones — find something inside that hints at a new beginning.

The overwhelming evidence that victory is so unlikely as to be essentially unthinkable is shifted around and reshaped to allow shafts of light to split the darkness.

Scenarios are imagined that end with men on other men’s shoulders, cups being presented, a speech, bonfires, a wild night.

And best of all — the Monday. Nothing beats the Monday after winning a championship: a day that begins early and lasts well into Tuesday, and maybe forgets to stop for another few days.

Reality won’t be long about blowing all those gorgeous thoughts to little pieces, but when it comes down to it, much of the joy of sport is how it provides a platform for people to dream.

This dreaming is not a simple matter of escapism, an attempt to beat down the walls of ‘real life’ and to find joy in an experience that exists outside normality. Sport is a normal part of everyday life. It is something people do and something they think about all the time. What makes it all the more powerful, however, is that it is also something they can imagine.

It is this capacity of sport to make people dream, even as they do, that allows it to grab such a hold on people’s lives.

For example, playing a game — any game — can bring pure joy. This is true of even the most seemingly banal of games. The Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon — who fled from Sarajevo in the midst of war in the 1990s — wrote a lovely memoir of his life, in the course of which he talked about playing five-a-side soccer.

He wrote of “the rare moment of transcendence that might be familiar to those who play sports with other people; the moment, arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy an ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours; the moment that perishes — as moments tend to do — when you complete a pass. And all you are left with is a vague, physical, orgasmic memory of the evanescent instant when you are completely connected with everything and everyone around you.”

Mostly — almost always — sport does not seem like this. And mostly five-a-side soccer is an hour spent panting like a thirsty sheepdog, swinging kicks at the ball or at another panting sheepdog.

And for all that there are dreams in sport, its reality is often laced with struggle, disappointment, rejection, disillusionment, even anger.

Only a fool can argue that sport is something that is inherently, absolutely good. For example, people who look to sport to uphold notions of integrity and fair play are certain to be cruelly disappointed. Another novelist, Wilkie Collins — this time writing in the 19th century — said that, far from teaching a man virtuous behaviour, sport instead taught him how “to take every advantage of another man that his superior strength and superior cunning can suggest”.

The sordid underbelly of modern sport —the cheating, fixing, drug-taking, violence, greed, exploitation, and narcissism — is plain for all to see. All of that is undeniable, and so too is the inevitability of defeat.

Some defeats feel so bad that they can almost never really be shaken off. They wander across the mind at the most unexpected of moments and the pain returns.

Telling someone it is only a game and that losing a game is in no way important in the greater scheme of things, especially when set against the real problems of people’s lives, is to state the obvious — but it is also to completely miss the point.

The loss of proper perspective when it comes to the sport is at its very core. The capacity to provoke extravagant emotions — good and bad — that somehow seem proportionate, even when they are clearly not at all so when later reconsidered, is evidence of just how consuming sport can be.

It wraps itself like bindweed around the emotions and this — more than anything else — is what goes a long way to explaining the hope that January brings.

It may be that a passion for play is at the heart of what attracts people to sport in the first place, but hoping and dreaming is often what brings them back again and again.

Because this is the year.