There is a game you can play without using any sort of ball. It’s called war.

When the Mongols played the first iteration of what would eventually become every ball- or puck-based sport, they did it by knocking around the severed heads of their enemies.

Without balls, we’re back to bows, arrows and a rapine horde sweeping across the steppe.

They took the balls away from the kids at Earl Beatty Public School this week.

They are still allowing Nerf balls, which absorb moisture like sponges and, once water-logged, land like boulders. If protection is the goal here, they’d be better off letting the kids throw batteries at each other.

In explaining the ban on ‘hard’ (i.e. every other sort of) balls, school principal Alicia Fernandez said, they “have to balance safety and happy.”

You feel for Fernandez. The same people who are giving her the gears now would be the ones baying for her blood after Junior catches a line drive in the ear.

That hurts. I’ve done it, while staring mindlessly off into the middle distance during a gym-class game of slo-pitch. It might’ve worked out alright if I’d been playing left field. I was, however, standing at third base.

To my best recollection, I’ve been hit hard with a softball (in the ear), a baseball (in the crotch), a volleyball (in the nose), a football (crotch again), an Indian rubber ball (God, my aching crotch) and a paintball (in the throat).

Why leave it at balls?

I’ve also been injured by every other type of sporting implement. Some nitwit taking practice cuts 18 inches from my head hit me in the armpit with the tip of a baseball bat during a little-league game and knocked me unconscious. I’ve been cut with hockey sticks and hurling sticks and broke three toes while landing awkwardly after a long jump at summer camp.

Football? Knocked unconscious three times. My high school coach had a habit of smacking players on the helmet with his clipboard to correct mistakes.

During one awful practice, he was walking up and down the line, berating us and clutching that clipboard dangerously. As he passed me, I took off my helmet for a breather. He spun back suddenly, still expecting me to be helmeted, and snapped the clipboard in half on my forehead. It hurt somewhere between a volleyball in the nose and a football in the groin. That I stayed upright made me a temporary team hero. Even better, the coach was always nice to me after that.

I was a depressingly average athlete. That is the priceless, PG-rated, go-to war story of my school days.

Point being, sports don’t just contain an element of danger — they are defined by it.

If a game is being played anywhere — regardless of its particulars — people will get hurt.

Despite the limited danger, no one is afraid while playing a sport. Fear is much worse than pain, and it’s confined to the world outside of games. Balls are an escape from fear.

They also mitigate whatever danger there is in sports because, in order to get the ball from Player A to Player B, a certain amount of bodily space must be created.

Without balls, hockey is fistfighting, football is that kiddie riot called Red Rover and baseball is impossible so you might as well start smoking in your spare time.

Without balls you’re rolling around the dirt and bashing each other mercilessly. You know what sport doesn’t require a ball? Boxing.

Of course, this isn’t about balls or sport. It’s about shielding children from every sort of harm, which is itself a terrible harm to inflict.

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A kid who hasn’t tested his/her boundaries in physical competition is being trained for timidity in adolescence. A kid who’s never been hurt is one who lives in fear of injury.

A kid who’s never done battle in the schoolyard is a kid without comrades or confidence.

A kid without a ball is already an adult, worn down by the cares we invented balls to escape from.