When my father was dying — when the reality of his decline seemed to be pressing us into the center of the earth, and every day felt suddenly crucial — we started a new ritual: watching “Jeopardy!” together. We watched in person when we could, but we lived 3,000 miles apart, so more often it was over FaceTime. I would call at 7 p.m. My father had lost much of his motor control by then, but he could still answer his phone and wave a weak hello. Out of his TV would come the “Jeopardy!” theme song — a bright, compulsively hummable tone poem designed to make you feel as if you were reading an encyclopedia while bouncing on a trampoline.

That music was a trigger. It meant that, for the next 30 minutes, my father, my stepmother and I could forget diagnoses and suction tubes and the swallowability of various foods. We could sink together into the deep comforts of the game — the march of clues down the board, the rising and falling scores, the call and response of answers and questions. We could allow ourselves to be hypnotized by that special, rich, clear, distinctive, eternal “Jeopardy!” blue. The show implied a whole world: a hushed, calm, serious space in which knowledge was celebrated and rewarded. Its format (Jeopardy, Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy) was so orderly and ritualistic that watching felt almost religious, like running rosary beads through your fingers.

I hadn’t watched regularly since I was a kid, so it was a relief to see that nothing essential had changed: the theme song, the announcer, the blue board of clues. And of course the host. Alex Trebek has now served as the high priest of “Jeopardy!” for 35 years, but somehow it feels even longer than that. Trebek seems eternal, as if he has been standing up there in his neutral suits, hyperenunciating words in his buttery voice, forever. He is one of TV’s archetypal father figures: the way he flashes mild disappointment when contestants miss easy questions; the way he pronounces French words with the savor of someone tasting fine wine; the way he chats with contestants, at scheduled intervals, like a father standing on the porch with a prom date — dutiful, genial, stilted. He seems, somehow, like the father of trivia itself, the source of all the clues on the board.