Businesses come and go. It’s the way of the world. A shop opens. It stays open (or not) pending the vagaries of commerce, of supply and demand, of profit and loss, of competition, of something called the market.

A local sports store shut its doors recently. On a large corner site that was long ago a large service-station. (Remember them?) Video might have killed the radio star, and now online shopping is killing bricks and mortar.

For sports lovers a sports store is a bit like a church. A special space. It’s not as holy as an oval or a pitch or a court or even a concrete canyon of a stadium, but it has meaning beyond dollars and cents, beyond purchasing products.

Sports lovers want to linger in such places. They want to smell and touch the goods. They want to stay there and just look at all these – well – toys, really. Toys that are objects of desire, nostalgia, dreams.  “I could live here,” you find yourself thinking.

When a sports store closes the door shuts on so many hopes and memories. When it stands empty – not a skerrick of a bat or a ball or a boot in sight as you look into the dullness – futility stares back at you.

As a child you learnt not to loiter, an early lesson in the nature of commerce.

“You’re either buying something or not, sonny. Otherwise, you’re just getting in the way.”

So you keep out of the way. Window-shopping on weekends, dawdling on the way home after school. The coins in the folded up brown paper bag meant for your tuck shop lunch won’t ever buy that racquet.

There’s no column called Romance in the ledger of a business.

There’s no button on the till (Remember them?) that says, “Stay, sonny, soak it all up, because beyond the doorway, out there, is the rest of the world.”