Chapter 9 - A Spectator’s Notebook - Exploring the Text: At the beginning of the second section (para. 10), Vervaecke says that sports has given her children what she, as a single mother, could not: “letting them shed, for the game’s duration, grief, rage, loneliness, or boredom, and allowing them to take on skill and cunning, filling them with inspiration and determination, sometimes awe” (para. 10). How does each of the anecdotes that follow illustrate some part of that statement?