Out on Lake Washington, you hear them in the predawn murk: coaches barking, rowers gasping, sounds as familiar to the morning as the Canada geese that clack above the boys and girls in the boats. In Seattle’s first light, you see the slender crafts cutting through the chop of the lake, oars dipping in strained union.

“Harmony, balance, rhythm,” said the legendary designer of racing shells George Pocock. “There you have it. That’s what life is all about.”

People who go looking for life’s meaning in sports will usually find themselves belly up at the wrong bar, crying over a walk-off homer by the bad guys. The hulk who made the game-saving tackle was bulked up on performance-enhancing drugs. The basketball player who tossed up the buzzer-beater is also a wife-beater. That winning home run was slammed by a man who has shamed the game and all the great names he’s now passing. What meaning is there in corruption? Just that it has the same reach in sports as in politics, law or education. Oh, and the banality.

But in crew, the sport of rowing, we may have found something better than the sum of all other games. When Daniel James Brown showed me his galley for “The Boys in the Boat” a few years ago, I was thrilled, but had somewhat modest hopes for his memorable book. Americans don’t watch, or even think about, rowing, one of the oldest of organized human competitions. As for history, well, we like our past-tense narratives filtered through gauze and served with plenty of blood.