NO FLAG ON THE PLAY.(controversy over proceduralism and substance, as shown by end of football playoff game between New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers)

Stanley Fish, the Milton scholar, critical provocateur, and dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sometimes tells an old story about the legendary major-league umpire Bill Klem. He uses it to illustrate a point about postmodernist criticism, but it is also applicable to overlooked instances of pass interference in close football games. "Klem's behind the plate," Fish said last week. "The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. The pitch comes. The batter doesn't swing. Klem for an instant says nothing. The batter turns around and says, 'O.K., so what was it, a ball or a strike?' And Klem says, 'Sonny, it ain't nothing 'till I call it.' What the batter is assuming is that balls and strikes are facts in the world and that the umpire's job is to accurately say which one each pitch is. But in fact balls and strikes come into being only on the call of an umpire."

Fish's--and Klem's--view of the metaphysics of the strike zone may be of some use to fans of the New York Giants who believe that their team got jobbed in its bewildering playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers the other day. When the referees, on the game's last, desperate play, neglected to call a pass-interference penalty that would have given the Giants another attempt at a winning kick, and when the National Football League officially acknowledged, the next afternoon, that the refs had blown it, many thoughtful fans had the presence of mind to say, "The Giants deserved it, anyway." They tackled poorly. They played tentatively. They retaliated unnecessarily. They blew a twenty-four-point lead. Earlier, when that lead seemed insurmountable, they had behaved badly: they taunted, gloated, and preened. Above all, by botching two field-goal attempts in the final three minutes they loused up the kicking game, which in some precincts is considered the key to winning at football (along with the running game, the passing game, the turnover ratio, the third-down-conversion rate, the battle of wits, the war in the trenches, and the coin toss). So perhaps the non-call was, as the Germans might say, Gottes Strafe: God's punishment. Or, as the 49ers' head coach, Steve Mariucci, remarked dryly, "Bummer."

But many fans do not possess presence of mind. They have the ...