SPORTS: Football is life. Long live Chapecoense.

Football is often a screen on to which we project various aspects of our lives.  Some people identify with underdogs and so they follow underdog teams.  Or they simply, in their own minds, turn their teams into underdogs.  Some dream of being titans so they follow larger than life football teams, or they elevate their teams to the level of titans.  It's like love, the romantic kind where you see your lover as a reflection of yourself or a reflection of what your self needs in order to be satisfied with itself.  If you see yourself as a giant or if you need giants in your life you may support a club like Real Madrid, the team of Galacticos.  If you identify with the small man who stands up to any challenge and becomes a giant in his own right you may be a fan of Atletico Madrid, a team with less money than the giants that often beats the giants.

But even with football, as in real life, at a certain point romantic love transforms into something less self-centred, real love.  You stop getting angry with your team when it loses and you start suffering with the players when they suffer on the pitch. You find yourself worrying about their injuries, angry at other fans for berating them and even curious at times about their personal lives and how they are getting along in life off the field.  You get to know their strengths and weaknesses and you become ok with their imperfections.  Your player may have a poor left foot but he's one of your heroes.  And the lad has been with the team since he was a teenager so he is one of our own, you remind yourself.

There's also the camaraderie with other fans.  It becomes one big extended family sharing victories and defeats together.  It becomes bigger than family.  It becomes a community of shared hopes, dreams and visions of the future.  We get together in groups and in forums online to discuss strategy, to discuss team politics, to discuss management and the way forward.  It even evolves beyond that to interaction with fans from other teams discussing the state and future of the game.  And at this point it feels like so much more than just a game.

This is why the expression "Football Is Life" is so popular.  It is a sport that imitates life in so many ways.  At a certain point, the imitation is so perfect it doesn't feel like an imitation anymore.  The passion is real.  The love is real.  Grown men cry over defeats. They cry tears of joy over the victories.  Boys and girls nurture dreams. There's the anxiety, the suffering with your team and even heart attacks.  Weddings have been scheduled so as not to clash with matches.  Work has been skipped.  Life has been disrupted and life has been celebrated.  Football is life.

And that is why so many football fans around the world, even those who never heard of the Brazilian team Chapecoense before today, feel the heart-wrenching loss of this team that perished in a horrific air disaster, yesterday.  The connection that all football fans share through football, the passion for a sport that takes up such a great part of our lives, makes such a tragic loss so relatable.  In football as in life we are bound by our empathy and our identification with each other. In the world of football those traits are arguably stronger than in any other sport in the world.

That is why I am gutted by the deaths of so many members of a football team in one night.  I am gutted for their families, their friends and their fans.  I am gutted by the photographs of fans crying in the bleachers of their stadium in Chapeco, Brazil.  The most striking thing about these images is the fans facing a football field devoid of players, a field on to which they would normally project their hopes and dreams but now only reflects a shocking emptiness.  I feel that sense of loss as if it were my own.

Any one of us who has suffered a great tragedy in our family knows that these days will not pass easily for the people in Chapeco.  The days and nights will be long and hard.  If I could offer any comfort to the fans now it is that life inevitably goes on with the living and how we cope with the past is often related to how we approach the future.  The vice president of Chapecoense has vowed to rebuild the team.  It is a declaration that he and the fans will have to hold on to in order to survive this trial.  It may seem almost pointless in this moment of despair but with time this statement of intent will exercise a kind of gravity to pull the club forward.

The greatest legacy of the players who lost their lives on that flight can be the continuation and survival of the hopes and dreams of Chapecoense.  The players already set this in motion by achieving what many never expected this little team to achieve.  They rose from Brazil's lower tiers of football to reach the highest tier, the Serie A. This year they reached the final of a major international competition, the Copa Sudamericana, for the first time in their history.  They were travelling to play this final when disaster struck.

Hopefully, the club and the fans will now draw on what makes football so great, the fact that it is a screen on to which we can project our human spirit and our aspirations.  May the club rise like a phoenix from the ashes and may all the fans, families and friends live that painful but worthwhile rebirth. May this spirit of survival and achievement be the legacy of those players and coaches who worked so hard to put a little team on the map, a team that was on its way in an airplane to achieving something great.  Maybe the flight to football glory has just been delayed.  Never stop flying because that is what football is all about.  Football is life. Life goes on. Long live Chapecoense.