Cricket may not be everyone’s favourite sport these days, but there is no shortage of people wanting to discuss it. That says something quite revealing about the sport and its mass appeal.

For all the revulsion and negativity that our recent scandals have evoked, the appetite for consuming cricket remains unaffected. Indeed, it might have been whetted even further. This public relationship with cricket may be superficially perplexing, but the explanation is quite simple: there is something in this dish that keeps you hungry for more.

Cricket ultimately has a clarifying innocence, and it seizes you in its bewitching spell when you are infused with the purest innocence of all, the innocence of childhood. Like other fans, I too remember being seduced by this sport, in my case some time around the age of 12 or 13, which is a time of discovery. New feelings and emotions appear from nowhere and surprise you with their intensity.

Just as with your first crush, where the obvious feminine or masculine (as the case may be) features attract but it is the eccentric details that take you to new heights, with cricket too the straightforward bat-and-ball contest is what initially catches the eye, but it is the eccentricities that go on to unleash unprecedented delights.

Schoolboys have a great nose for discovering comrades with shared obsessions, and I soon found myself in a joyful little universe surrounded by fellow fanatics who saw cricket expressed in everything. It started with numbers. Money, time, exam marks, anything numerical, would get likened to cricket scores. Contests would be created out of nothing.

In one version, we counted irrelevant acts – the number of times a teacher approached the blackboard, for example, or how often he touched his spectacles – during a single period and declared it to be the wickets taken by our favorite bowler. The next period this procedure would be repeated, this time on behalf of a competing bowler, to see if he could do better.

One of my friends, you could call him the leader of the pack, was rather taken by the idea of left-handed batsmen, and he passed this fascination on to us. Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad, Majid Khan, Mushtaq Mohammad and Asif Iqbal were the big names of the day, and that none of these players were left-handed must have had something to do with it, I am sure. Almost every Test nation had an attractive left-hander or two, so why not Pakistan? To be sure, we did have Sadiq Mohammad and Wasim Raja, but we thought we could have done with more. We felt deprived.

One day, this friend arrived at school and announced that he had seen Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad bat left-handed. This evoked incredulity, followed by bewilderment. India’s 1978 tour of Pakistan was ongoing, I remember; we had all seen the same PTV telecast that our friend had, and Zaheer and Miandad had batted right-handed like they always do, so what was he talking about?

At break time, when the rest of us threatened to pounce on him, he revealed his secret. He had watched TV in a mirror, and with the inverted image you could finally see Zaheer and Miandad drive through the covers with left-handed ease and elegance. We tried it ourselves, and loved it. Our families thought we had gone round the bend watching TV reflected in a mirror, but it tickled us no end.

Another friend was consumed by the idea of cricket commentary. He could impersonate all the leading commentators, with particular expertise in imitating Chishty Mujahid and the late Col. Shujauddin. In fact, his versions of Omar Kureishi and Munir Hussain were pretty decent too, and his attempts at the Australian Bill Lawry and the Englishman Peter West – admixed with our standard Karachi brogue – could be side-splittingly funny.

He had an elaborate theory of how Pakistan’s on-field fortunes fluctuated in direct relation to the identity of the person in the commentary box. I forget the details, but Pakistan going wicket-less during the commentary of Hasan Jalil, and scoring with abandon during coverage by Iftikhar Ahmed, were some of the postulates.

One day this friend produced a TDK cassette tape and said that he had self-auditioned to record a piece of commentary in the privacy of his own home that he wanted us to listen to. We were eager to sample his efforts, figuring he had commentated while watching a real match on television with the sound turned off, but it turned out to be something of a disappointment.

To be fair, his commentary was fluently delivered with passion and pep, but the ‘action’ lacked even a passing resemblance to reality. Majid Khan, standing on a rain-affected pitch at Lord’s, was facing Dennis Lillee, Michael Holding, and Andy Roberts, and hitting each and every delivery for six. Try something else, we suggested to our friend gently. He happens to be a successful banker in the Middle East now, so perhaps that was a good thing.

Then, of course, there were the usual time-wasters like book cricket and dice cricket – except that they weren’t time-wasters to us but enchanting worlds of fantasy, into which you could blissfully escape for hours.

Book cricket, if you are unfamiliar with the concept, has to do with scoring runs from imagined deliveries based on randomly-opened page numbers of a book. In dice cricket, you score off imagined deliveries by rolling a game cube; a second cube can be added to modulate risk. This must sound mind-numbingly boring to many of you, but at a certain age and in a certain frame of mind, the delight is infinite and the possibilities endless.

You really have to wonder how an esoteric game of bat and ball based on abstruse rules and stipulations can generate such endless charm. I think the reason lies in the innocence of cricket and, since cricket mirrors life so exactly, ultimately in the innocence of life itself.

After observing die-hards like her husband and me following England-Pakistan ODIs late into the night despite cricket having just kicked us in the face, a dear friend recently remarked yehi hai mohabbat, this is true love.