Games often create an order that resembles the cadenced life of ashrams and monasteries, and sporting expeditions are in certain respects like religious pilgrimages. The acts they comprise are invested with special meaning and are pointed toward perfection. Athletes feel the effect of a playing field in their bones. Fenway Park or an Olympic stadium or a famous golf course like St. Andrews can bring a quickening of the spirit, a concentration of energies, a connection with heroes past and future that give performances in these places a heightened quality. And even when there is no stadium or arena involved, sport implicitly creates a sacred time and place. A mountain to be climbed, an ocean to be crossed, or a stretch of countryside to be raced on can summon up significance and power for us simply by being designated the field of adventure. The spatial and temporal boundedness of sport, by ordering and sublimating our energies and by closing off the world's drudgery and confusion, can evoke our spiritual depths like a work of art or a monastic discipline.
— Michael Murphy, Rhea White, In the Zone