You didn’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the gamefulness of “Baseball,” Moses Pendleton’s athletic homage to baseball presented Friday by the dance troupe Momix at the Maine Center for the Arts. The piece, created in 1994, is an evening-length contemplation of America’s favorite pastime, but it also is a commentary about the connections between the beloved game and primal, ancient, classical and modern forms.

Pendleton, who was a competitive skier in his youth, founded Momix in 1980 after establishing the famed dance troupe Pilobolus in the early 1970s. “Baseball” grew out of a commission he received in Arizona and was originally a short piece, but has grown to be his signature work with the company.

The entire performance takes place behind a scrim, onto which images of stadiums, players and newspaper headlines are projected. The backup music is both popular and classical, and the voices of Ernie Harwell, Nat King Cole, Humphrey Bogart, Casey Stengel and Mickey Mantle speak out about the sport. The choreography further mixes ballet technique with circus routine and acrobatics. But the overall feel of this mixed-media presentation is definitively avant-garde. It dares to marry the sacred and the profane. And, in Pendleton’s eyes, baseball is clearly the sacred part.

That’s where this “experience” really hits a home run. Pendleton is so pure in his conviction that when he makes connections between baseball and history, philosophy or religion, you can follow his thinking. There’s something ancient about baseball, Pendleton says in a figurative way when cavemen play catch with a dinosaur egg and cavewomen leap in a prehistoric wave — and Stonehenge is projected on the scrim.

There are profound moments, too, such as when a solo dancer glides through an adoring pas de deux with an oversized baseball. She holds it high as if it were a holy thing, and amid all the silliness, the seriousness of her mood and movement still works. Equally lovely is the opening of an oversize mitt to reveal a Venus figure.

Even if you had never been to a dance performance or better yet, if you had, then you couldn’t help but be inspired by the physical control and ebullience of Lorin Campolattaro, Sandy Chase, Renee Jaworski, Claire Kaplan, Pi Keohavong, Kevin Kimple and Suzanne Lampl. In many ways, they show how Pendleton’s choreography is truly about form — whether it’s the human body or a baseball game.

You’d have to be a pretty bad sport not to find something to appreciate in this celebratory experience — even if it was just the recording of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” shtick at intermission. Some may have found “Baseball” ponderously long, or its episodic segments too unleashed and existential. But it asks very little of its viewers and posits simply this: Baseball is awesome. That is, after all, a reasonable conclusion by the end, in which a baseball appears between the hands of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. And then there are the closing words: The game endures.