The thing about the internet is … it lasts forever.

Or it must seem that way for those who wish people would stop dredging up some social-media faux pas of theirs from four or five years ago.

The reality, says a key official at Google, is that we may be entering a new Dark Age, in terms of how much of this “eternal” information will be accessible in future, saying this could be “a forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century“.

All that information we are swimming in now? Future generations may be unable to access some huge fraction of it.

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I had no inkling this would turn into one of the most uplifting nights of my life as a sports journalist.

I knew that the Switzerland-based International Sports Press Association had teamed with Abu Dhabi Media to arrange for the first global competition meant to honor the best in sports journalism.

What was not clear, until tonight, was how professional, how inspirational, how self-affirming the event could be for those of us who have given our professional careers to writing about sports, speaking about sports or bringing sports to the screen.

The televised awards ceremony in the ballroom at Etihad Towers in the UAE’s capital, made sports journalists feel like what we do … matters. And might even be noble, now and then.

I wish every sports journalist on the planet could have seen this. (Check this bit of video to get a sense of what it looked and felt like.)

It was the Oscars for sports journalism, and who ever thought that would happen?

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Anyone who follows the English Premier League knows it has coughed up two big stories, so far this season.

–The rise of Leicester City.

–The fall of Chelsea.

The former, last season, nearly was relegated (sent to the second division) before a sprint to the finish raised them to 14th place in a 20-team league.

The latter, last season, won the Premier League and led nearly the whole way.

Now, their situations are turned upside down, and when they played tonight the bizarre new reality was reinforced when Leicester City won 2-1.

This is beyond odd because …

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In the previous post I fretted over the possibility that the Golden State Warriors could break the Los Angeles Lakers’ record NBA winning streak of 33 games.

Within hours of that post going up … the Warriors lost, for the first time this season.

And I will take some credit for that.

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We remember how this goes: Your team is so good, so much better than everyone else, that the idea of them losing is hard to imagine. Or remember.

In 1971-72, it was the Los Angeles Lakers, who won a record 33 consecutive games, over a span of 64 days.

This season, it is the Golden State Warriors, who are 24-0, over a span of 45 days.

This is of general interest because the Warriors look like they could break the Lakers’ 44-year-old NBA record, and it is of personal interest because I was a huge Lakers fan, back then, and feel a sense of ownership of those memories.

The streaks are interesting enough that I did some research into how good they were during their streaks.

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This is a good idea — extending the protective netting at Dodger Stadium to reach the edge of both dugouts.

Too many objects fly into the seats near home plate, both balls and bats or even shards of bats.

Major League Baseball has recommended all of its teams extend the netting, and the Dodgers were one of the first to announce they will comply with the suggestion.

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Stefan Zweig. Know him?

I thought not.

Neither did I, until I expressed my interest in the history of Europe before the First World War while in the earshot of our friend Mary, who has an enormous library in her home in Paris.

She later sent me the names of five authors, including Zweig, with the notation: “Memoirs of life in Central Europe before World War I in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday.”

That is how I came to read a man described as “one of the most popular writers in the world” at the height of his career, in the 1920s and 1930s.

An author now nearly forgotten. And, when his name is broached, he often is dismissed as a literary lightweight. Perhaps the best-known piece this century on Zweig is a 4,400-word thrashing given him in The Times of London by a living German poet.

Which leads us to muse about artists applauded in their time, and those whose fame evaporates soon after they leave the stage.

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After six years on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, I can safely identify two additions to Sports Competitions I Follow.

The English Premier League … which is a subdivision of the ultra elite European Champions League.

This is where the world’s most famous sports teams come to play because, really, we must concede that more humans are aware of this competition, and follow it, than any other.

This is where Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Juventus play, as well as the top English sides who are trying hard to catch up.

The final 16 in the competition were determined tonight, and that’s another part of the Champions League I like — the middle-of-the-night exotic-ness of it, at least in the UAE.

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One of the many memorable moments in Steve Martin‘s 1991 film L.A. Story involves his portrayal of local TV weatherman  Harris K. Telemacher speaking with another Angeleno about a shocking drop in temperature … all the way down to 58 degrees!

They talk about “closing the windows” and “letting the cats inside”.

Martin’s character sums up by saying: “Well, that’s how L.A. coped with that surprise low of 58 degrees that turned the weekend into a real weenie-shrinker!”

We had the Abu Dhabi version of that tonight … when the temperatures might have dropped beneath 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21C), for a few hours.

With wind!

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Three years ago, I wrote about this: How big a day December 7 was, for much of my life, as Americans remembered Pearl Harbor — the surprise attack in Hawaii that took the U.S. into World War II.

And, mostly, I haven’t changed my outlook … how time and current events conspire to push notable days back and down … to the point that the New York Times’s website today relegated Pearl Harbor to the mention it got in the “Today in History” feature provided by the Associated Press. Even 15 years ago, it would have been noted by a story in every American newspaper.

Today, I was left to muse over the concept of each generation having a day or two of “fame/infamy” … events which remain seared into memories … but which within X number of years are replaced by two or three more recent upheavals.

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