Nothing brought this home to me more than last month, when the National Basketball Association was jubilantly celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was not only much clever mingling of marketing and reminiscence. No, what you heard clearest was many wise men proclaiming that basket- ball is now the American game, the one in rhythm with our hectic, cybermanic boomer-X lives.

But wait. There is also what is everywhere else called ““American’’ football. A run-of-the-mill ““Monday Night Football’’ tilt attracts more viewers than a World Series showdown–even one with the Yankees playing. Football is glamorous and violent and one big casino, and what could be more all-American? Why, the Super Bowl has superseded the World Series, both as an athletic and a cultural event, even if, mostly, people only end up talking about which commercials fared the best.

And hockey–ice hockey!–heavens to Betsy, even the sun belt is now peppered with NHL franchises. The movies that Hollywood used to make about the Bad News Bears being cutesy-poo playing baseball are now made about the Mighty Ducks. Moreover, most incredible of all, alien soccer is also struggling to squeeze into this Athletic-American smorgasbord.

In the face of all this, I really don’t worry anymore how baseball is doing, now that it is just another prime-time fill-in to help Fox win a week. No, but what I do worry–anyhow: wonder–about is whether we as a country have lost something of ourselves now that we no longer have a game that, maybe, helps explain the us in our ““heterogeneous.’’ Jacques Barzun’s famous observation from 1954 that ““whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball’’ simply has no currency anymore.

I’m probably being a bit sappy. Have any other people ever needed a National Pastime that seeks to illuminate them? I mean, the Canadians claim hockey as their totem, but I have never yet met a single Canadian off the ice who at all resembles the Canadians on it. And soccer is everybody else’s identifying sport–from Brazil to Norway–so it is really nobody’s.

And yet, dammit, maybe it is good to have yourself a National Pastime. Even the coming of spring to America seemed more defined back when Spring Training heralded that; and for the whole country to listen with one ear every afternoon to the ““October Classic’’ bound us in a special way that neither ““Seinfeld’’ nor ““E.R.’’ nor Michael Jordan could ever hope to in this niche America. And I know this: of all the games I ever saw, ever, anywhere, the one that touched me the most was one nation’s team playing its national sport.

I was in the city of Douala, which you have never heard of, because it is not in any league and has no nickname. Where Douala is, is in Cameroon, and the Cameroonian national team had somehow gotten to the quarterfinals of the World Cup, playing England, and so the whole city, the whole nation, was involved in this one game. The people thronged together in the streets to watch on public TV sets, or massed in bars, with dirt floors, if they had the wherewithal to buy one beer and the emotional forbearance to nurse it.

Nowhere, ever, have I seen people care so about their one thing, this game of their country. This was not overemphasizing sport. It was overemphasizing belonging. That is what baseball did for us in America, when the game was singular and we were young and struggling to find ourselves. When Cameroon scored the go-ahead goal, a stout lady grabbed me and danced with me, her eyes so joyously beaming, and someone snapped a photograph of that ecstasy, and I still keep it on my wall, because it is the best ““sports picture’’ I have.

Unfortunately, Cameroon lost the game. And now we have lost our National Pastime. Someday, I think, we will regret that baseball failed to accompany us across that span to the 21st century.