This past Sunday in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section there was a review of a 1930s Broadway play that had a recent revival in New York. The songs and story centered around the times, the Depression, World War I and the music of the era.

The reviewer liked everything about the artistic production, but concluded it was so far removed in time that a young, eager theatergoer would find little with which to relate and thus leave the theater wondering “what was that all about?”

That point of view has reared its head before in sports context. The Times’ reviewer’s concept of the revived play is analogous to how some involved in sports have examined the games we watch today and wondered about the relevance of the individuals and statistical records that have come before.

There is an ever-increasing tendency in our society to dismiss the past, period. A good deal of that probably comes from the narcissism of our times. Really, how could anything not done by ourselves ever have had any worth?

In sports, that approach may never have been better set to words than when the Fox network began broadcasting major league baseball and the operations head was quoted as saying he didn’t want his announcers mentioning anyone in baseball who was dead.

That is consistent with so much of the media’s mistaken infatuation with the young adult audience, the under-30 age group. The media, at least, thinks no one in that grouping ever had an original thought not related to sex and certainly never gives a passing glance to history of any kind.

That being the case, and that age group being the one most watching the television/computer screen, according to the surveys, why would a media entity presenting sports coverage want to even mention anyone who might not have visited a web site in her lifetime?

Of course, there are lots of good reasons. Sports lives off the efforts of athletes to break records. Both individual (the home run race) and team (the Yankees chasing the all-time win mark) records are what drives the sports business day in, day out, season after season.

Those records have meaning only because there were people, real people, who set them. Their stories are the foundation for every new record and sports tale. The vintage shots of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris aren’t continually in front of us by accident. They attract the attention of sports fans of every age and give the current stories context.

There is another paramount reason the past of sports is so vital to the games and to fans. The heroes.

It is an overused term when applied to sports. It is a term that probably should have little to do with what transpires on a playing surface. Yet, this society has made heroes out of athletes forever. Bigger-than-life kids and adults who get to shine because of God-given talents have long captured the fancy and “gee, I wish that were me” syndrome.

In this time and place, those heroes became harder to find. Because the press is more skeptical than ever of the myths that develop around real, and thus imperfect, sports figures and the blemishes, sometimes big scars, that publicly attach to today’s athletes make the act of hero creation more difficult.

That being so, the sports heroes of old become even more important to the games. Whatever blemishes are public, they are probably less weighty than those of today.

With the revived play, the essence is to see and feel what was and wonder where one fits in time and place. The same is true for legends and stories of sports.

NEWS columnist Gary Thorne, an Old Town native, is an ESPN and CBS broadcaster.