Chris Mangan

Sports are a great thing. They allow people to escape their everyday life for a little while, relax and put their life in the backseat.But sometimes, no matter the allure of sports, life takes precedence over everything.This past week and into this week, the city of Fargo, N.D., has had to deal with mass amounts of flooding. The Red River has reached heights never seen before and has forced North Dakota State to cancel class for the past two weeks.Just days after playing in one of the biggest basketball games in NDSU history, the men’s basketball team was out helping build dikes to help protect the city from the flooding. Ben Woodside went from scoring 37 points against Kansas in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on March 20 to helping save Fargo from a disaster not even a week later.The Bison football team was supposed to start their spring practice on March 23, but head coach Craig Bohl instead had the team help protect the city.”We have some challenges,” Bohl told the Fargo Forum, “but the city has more challenges than spring football right now.”The Fargodome went from being the home of Bison football to the home of several thousand volunteers that helped fill sandbags.Concordia University-St. Paul and the University of North Dakota sent down athletes, as well as students, to help sandbag. It’s not surprising to see people in this part of the country come together and help each other – it’s what we do. The people of Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., and the students of the universities up there should be proud of what they have done for the communities. They could have sat back and let the government come in and do all the work for them. They decided that wasn’t good enough – they wanted to save the cities themselves, and they are succeeding right now. When federal help did come in, much of the levees and dikes were already in place thanks to the citizens of those two cities and several thousand volunteers that came in and helped. National Guardsmen came in from the surrounding states to patrol the main levees and dikes so people could go take care of their homes and make sure everything is safe there.The river has dropped significantly over the last couple of days, but conditions are still not perfect up there. They are battling another winter storm that may cause the river to rise once again, but expect the citizens of Fargo and Moorhead to battle to save their cities.The battle isn’t over – they still need the Red River to return to normal and then cleanup can begin, which will take weeks if not months. But, again, expect the citizens of these two communities to come together and get the job done. They have shown they already know how to do that.People sometimes place too much importance on sports; some even go as far as saying it’s a life or death thing. Sports has a place in this country, one that can help a lot of people forget things for a little while, but it is not a life or death situation. Flooding on the other hand is.