Do people really watch the NHL -- when it plays -- just for the fights? Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

Ever since I grew up, which was some time ago, I faithfully have expected one thing to change. That is, when I go into a men's room -- any men's room, anywhere in the world -- I have expected the people who design men's rooms to move the mirrors up higher. They never do. I cannot speak for ladies' rooms, but in men's rooms, the mirrors are always the same size, but they are placed too low over the sink so that most anybody must turn his head sideways to brush his hair or just to check out his face.

Yet the mirrors are placed low, so you can see your belly-button area clearly. But who wants to see that? Given a choice, you want to see your head, rather than your stomach. They don't have to make the mirrors any larger. Just move them up. But they never have, and I know now, with resignation, they never will.

Some things, you see, never change. Here are some of the stupid things that never will change in sport:

• Although a football team may have been playing perfect defense, if the other team must pass at the end of either half, the defensive team will change into a so-called prevent defense and immediately start giving up yardage. Why? Also, just for the record, even though we all say "prevent," like that in normal conversation, we say PREE-vent in football. Like DEE-fense instead of defense. If I had ever played football, I would have been DEE-ford.

• Critics of baseball always say that the sport is too slow to appeal to the younger generation. Only they have been saying this for about three generations now. If the critics were right, there should be no people left to have grown up liking baseball. But critics keep saying this, with confidence.

• People always say that auto racing fans only watch in order to see crashes and hockey fans only watch to see fights. Neither is true, but both are accepted in perpetuity.

• It is understood in sport that sometimes you get lucky, but in tennis if you get lucky and your shot hits the net and trickles over, you must apologize to your opponent.

• And everybody just accepts it as an article of faith that all baseball fans are crazy about home runs. Is this really true? It is invariably stated as irrefutable fact that the reason that the powers-that-be turned a blind eye from steroids is that everybody -- everybody -- loves home runs.

Do they? Home runs really aren't very exciting. What is exciting is when some outfielder leaps over the fence to catch the ball and thereby prevent -- excuse me: PREE-vent -- a home run.

When you think about it, home runs are about as exciting as extra points in football. They just go up and away. Doubles are more fun to watch. Double plays. Running catches. Hook slides. What I think has happened, though, is that highlights on television invariably concentrate on home runs. Boom. Over the fence. Boom. Over the fence. And announcers like to shout allegedly catchy things like, "Downtown!" and "Goin' yard!" We have been conditioned by highlights to think that we are homer crazy because that's what highlights feature.

Highlights are the ruination of sport. They show all the wrong things. Dunks. Fights. Holes-in-one by golfers not in contention. Home runs. And highlights, like mirrors in men's rooms, never will change.