There are about 10 million reasons why I love sports, but since returning to the business of more regular, structured introspection, I’ve considered one reason that was previously off my radar. It’s all about, particularly in the video age, our ability and desire to replay moments to dissect them, better understand them, relive them and, no doubt, over-analyze them.

I’m good at the latter, especially when it comes to myself. But with the growing awareness of the possibility of false memory, one would pay handsomely for videotape of, say, that moment in third grade, or that life-changing decision and all of the sensory input that preceded it. Imagine a team of analysts — hey! that’s what they call them on TV, but in this context, just perfect — showing replays from different angles, figuring out what went wrong, and how something came to be.

You can explore a moment ad infinitum with video handy. In a team sport — let’s say American football, with 22 players on the field — and analyze missed assignments, good execution and, sometimes, dumb luck. What I wouldn’t give for that as I examine my past.

A woman I dated a long time ago once said, “Stop living in the past; there’s no future in it.” She wasn’t directing it at me — it was more a phrase she said she’d coined and was proud of — but it could have applied to me, then and now. I spend far too much time reliving the past, looking at it from a fourth angle, and a fifth, as if once I finally understand it (or think I do), I can move on. It’s an illusion, I’ve come to know. You can never know all of the reasons something happened. There is always some layer (and another, and another) of perspective you lack. And guess what? Now that what we previously called “instant replay” is ubiquitous and even used to overturn the ruling of game officials on the field, sometimes there still is no satisfactory resolution. Sometimes the video evidence is inconclusive. That means it remains a judgment call, and by humans, based on insufficient information.

That’s really what it comes down to, more often than not, in life.