David Helene claims that viewers should lament that, just as the Saints were in the process of capturing their first ever Super Bowl victory, they were simultaneously robbing millions of the opportunity to watch Peyton Manning secure his place as the greatest quarterback of all time. Though I respect Helene’s opinion greatly, I fear he has demeaned the very essence of greatness.

Peyton Manning is a great quarterback. Of this, there is no doubt. I will not argue it, nor will I suggest that any other quarterback is or was greater. Graham, Starr, Unitas, Marino, Montana, Elway, Favre, and Brady have their merits, but ultimately Manning may surpass them all. Still, a victory this past Sunday in Miami would not have secured that. No, further—it never could have. This fact speaks not to any frailty of Manning’s statistical resumé (there is none); nor to some paucity of accolades (after all, the man has four MVPs); nor to any doubt regarding his mettle. (His suspect playoff record notwithstanding, he is nothing short of phenomenal in the clutch.) It speaks to the nature of greatness itself.

Sports have long convoluted our understanding of what it is to be great. So much of our collective sports consciousness revolves around numerical standards of quality. Numbers provide simplicity. One integer is bigger than the next. Three touchdowns are better than two. As the modern era bears witness to the proliferation of statistics and Moneyball economic analyses of sport, we are inundated with the belief that these numbers are omniscient. Perhaps in some ways they are. Perhaps they allow us to reduce complexity to simplicity. Perhaps they can delineate the bad from the good. Perhaps. They cannot, however, tell us who is great.

We all agree that salaries—Peyton’s is set to become the largest ever—do not measure greatness. Most of us have long ago concluded that statistics, haunted by baseball’s steroid scandals and hollowed by sweeping rule changes like the 24-second shot clock, do not symbolize the great. We see the dollars and box scores for what they are: mere symptoms of greatness. It is time to accept that championships, too, bear minimal substantive relevance in determining what is actually great.

We would not measure the greatness of Shakespeare in attendees to his plays, nor copies sold (although, frankly, I bet he would own in a playwright fantasy league). We would not measure the greatness of invention by the patents it produces. Similarly, we must not seek to quantify greatness in sports. Rather, we must recognize that greatness is about moment. It is about the mass of meaning created. In sports, greatness is the ability to paradoxically exceed all possible expectations while surprising no one. It is not the ability to hit a jump shot at the buzzer. No, it is the ability to break open for the ball at the elbow and, to those watching, have already drained it in the defender’s eye even before a teammate relinquishes the ball. It is to make the improbable seem certain, the impossible somehow conceivable, the thresholds of performance glaringly fragile. It is to make us believe that we were present for something of import.

Still, if greatness is measured in how it moves us, it must be intransitive. We cannot determine for another how great a moment is. In terms of absolute greatness, we cannot comparatively judge careers or compare between eras. The moment that greatness passes, it is devalued by its certainty and familiarity. We can’t see greatness on YouTube, hear it from a commentator, or read it in a book (unless, obviously, we’re judging the greatness of a book). It is limited to a single instant for a single person. We can approximate it. We can debate it. But we can never prove that Lincoln was greater than Washington, nor Babe Ruth greater than Jackie Robinson. We can’t experience their greatness simultaneously, and so we cannot compare the moments of experience; one is always more distant, or biased by our fandom, or appealing to the qualities we find “great.” So, Helene is correct that we all aspire to witness the “greatest,” but its existence as such is limited to our own experience in the present.

We watch sports, in part, for the chance that we will for the briefest moment feel our hearts skip, our minds vacate, our spines shiver, the conversation die. In that split second, somehow, the confining laws of physics, society—indeed reality itself—seem hopeless to constrict humanity. Our own brilliance is made paramount, our limitations totally peripheral. To witness greatness is to defy everything that imprisons us as human beings. Yes, Peyton Manning could have given that on Sunday night. He did not, his greatness rendered oddly vapid for one solitary night. But we should not lament. For, when a diminutive quarterback with a bum shoulder played a perfect game to single-handedly carry a beleaguered franchise to a title that united and inspired a shattered city—well, Dave, I’m not sure what you thought you saw, but I’m pretty darn certain I witnessed greatness.