ersion of Us vs. Them. Instead, I'll suggest that we regard
             both narratives as examples of and meditations on the function(s) of narrative in general, and I'll argue
             that Underworld's narrative strategies and temptations can lead us to a useful rereading of White Noise's
             well-worn hypotheses about the nature of plots.
             The argument runs like this. My first point about sports narrative is elementary enough, though it
             has some far-reaching consequences: a large part of the appeal of sports, quite apart from the sheer
             athleticism and visual stylin' that make up the bulk of most highlight reels, plays-of-the-week, and
             professional leagues' advertising campaigns, is the appeal of narrative itself. The Giants/Dodgers
             playoff game is a remarkable story on its own, involving a nailbiting tie game broken open in the eighth
             inning by one team followed by an improbable four-run rally by the other in the bottom of the ninth. But
             there are innumerable elaborations on this story, some of which involve the minutiae of this one game
             (the Giants' boneheaded baserunning error in the second inning, for instance), others that involve the
             history of the sport (and the rivalry among the three New York teams in the postwar era). Understanding
             the game, in other words, entails understanding the narratives in which it participates, the tangents and
             contexts and back stories and extrapolations that often make sports narrative more seductive for the
             qualities of the narrative than for the quality of the sports.
             But one of the things that makes sports narrative compelling is precisely the uncertainty about
             who shoulda won and who wuz robbed. Ask any basketball fan about the final seconds of the US-USSR
             gold medal game in the 1972 Olympics. Or ask any Buffalo Sabres fan about game six of the 1999
             Stanley Cup finals, in which Brett Hull scored an exceptionally dubious goal in triple...