I have epiphanies, eventually. As I was writing the introduction to my second book, Sports and Games of the Renaissance, I began recalling cherished insights from my freshman year in college that time had somehow transfigured from imagination into action.

One such moment came on the first day of class in Western Civilization. I was transfixed as the professor, who, like me, was legally blind, created context by pinpointing the year when the modern age began. For those of you who missed it, it was the regicidal 1649. But it was a brief comment about the Renaissance that caught my imagination. During the Renaissance, the professor said, artists and architects developed a broader sense of historical time; aware that their age was separated from a golden antiquity by a millennium of cultural lockdown.

Much is made of the astrolabe, printing press, and gunpowder as inventions that pulled medieval man into the modern world, but clocks, watches, and printed calendars probably had more to do with forging our coffee-break consciousness. During the Renaissance, people finally knew what time it was.

When the only non-solar means of measuring time is the tolling of a church bell, it is easy to view life as an inexorable plod towards the next world. During the Renaissance, man measured time in minutes and could thus separate work from leisure time. Clocks appeared in 1354; the first watches in 1500. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was adopted, beginning in Spain. Parsing the passage of days on printed calendars added awareness and certitude to the cycles of life, from celebrating birthdays, to anticipating (and perhaps even preparing for) revels and sports associated with the next feast day.

That professor’s remarks in a class twenty years earlier gave me an inspired point of departure when wrote the introduction to my Renaissance book. I soon learned that apart from playing cards and the pool table, the period produced almost no new sports or games. But a growing sense of leisure time made the Renaissance the moment when play was transformed from pastime into a vital component of daily life. This proved to be a vital shaping element for placing the book in the broader history of sports-an essential skill, since I was editing the Greenwood Press series Sports and Games through History.

My other freshman insight was less deep, but its effects were more immediate. One evening, as I was locating, listing, and memorizing the Apocalyptic beatitudes for a theology class, I heard two of my roommates (both athletic administration majors) quizzing each other for an upcoming history test. They actually had to know the dates of the two Dempsey-Tunney fights. They were angry when I shouted out the answers. I was stunned that they could actually walk into a class and be tested on their knowledge of sports, or that they would need to study things most people, in my opinion, knew from culture.

Those two moments went a long way to helping me design a future based on what interested me. Writing skills developed as an undergraduate enabled me to indulge my passion for sports, covering college football and hockey, while profiling luminaries such as Doug Flutie, Joe Paterno, and Marvin Hagler for the Manchester Union Leader. My success covering sports in turn provided an opportunity to explore an idea that had enthralled me. Experiences such as that remind me that humanities degrees are designed to build lives, not careers, but in time, one might follow the other.