The last week of December isn’t a big time for play openings, so I only saw The Connection. The Living Theatre brought back its big hit of 50 years ago, allowing us another pungent look at drug addicts waiting for their “connection” during act one, and then after they get it during intermission, spending the second act in a torpor, sleeping their lives away. It’s something, too, to once again see Living Theatre living legend Judith Malina on stage. At 82 and a half years young, she’s once again playing the Salvation Army do-gooder who’s trying to wean these guys off drugs. Her voice is now little-birdy, and she makes the character appropriately shrink into her skin, but, oh, what a beguiling smile she still has.

The rest of the week, I watched football, feeling sorry that my hometown Jets and my former hometown Patriots missed the playoffs by an eyelash or two. Had certain feelings about certain bowl games, too, but that’s not the point of the column.

This is: In watching the games, I often saw the camera switch to shots of the fans, whose faces were filled with the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. I felt defeated, too, as I once again I realized why sports will always be entrenched in people’s souls in a way that theater never can.

It’s simple. No matter where you live, there’s almost sure to be a sports team that represents you, by a manner of association. Certainly that’s true if you live in one of the nation’s biggest cities, but even if you live in Malvern, Pennsylvania, you’re going to root for nearby Philadelphia. And if you reside Randolph, Vermont, that’s what the New England Patriots are for.

I once spoke to a guy from Oakes, North Dakota, who volunteered, “You know what’s big in our state? High school football!” Well, yeah, because you don’t have any other teams, so you root for the Oakes Owls (or whatever they’re called) -- because, again, they represent you.

That’s it, you know: The dynamic that sports has and that theater doesn’t: The geographic association, so you feel like a winner when the team from your neck of the woods wins. Richard Greenberg dryly noted the “We Won!” phenomenon in Take Me Out, where Mason Marzac, a money man who hadn’t know a walk from a balk suddenly became a rabid baseball fan. When Mason joyously exclaimed “We won!” in referring to the (fictitious) New York Empires, he stopped to notice the pronoun he’d just used, and laughed at himself in contempt. “We,” he said with a shrug, realizing and admitting that truly, there is no “we” -- only “they” who play the game and literally profit from it. (Though, paradoxically, fans say “They stink” -- not “We stink” -- when the team suffers a loss.)

Nevertheless, literally millions of people insist that “we” do win when “they” win, for “they” on the team represent us as our unofficial ambassadors. It’s a way of substantiating or even justifying where we live and who we are. Philadelphia has often been a punch line for New York comics who sneeringly put down the town with no brotherly love lost. But these days, many Philadelphians feel superior, because their Phillies won the World Series last fall while both the Mets and Yankees didn’t even come close. Take that, New York!

Theater simply doesn’t have a way of fostering the same geographical affinity. The Tonys and all the other theater awards almost exclusively involve pitting one New York show against another, and that does nothing for people in Philly, Boston, or Baltimo’.

Yeah, but what about regional theater, you ask. Sure, people in Minnesota are proud of their Guthrie Theater, just as citizens of Providence like to laud Trinity Repertory Company. But you’ll never see those troupes or any theatrical company emerge victorious in a World Series or Super Bowl of theater. Yes, a Tony is bestowed to a regional theater each year, but that decision is made by theater critics, so there’s no official contest that theatergoers can witness the way sports fans can. The winner is even announced in advance, so there’s no real suspense factor. For that matter, when a regional theater wins a Tony, no one is even saying that the organization just had its best season; it’s more for a body of work.

So could there be a World Series for theater? It’s a lovely idea but an impractical one. How could it possibly work? There are, at the moment, 77 LORT (League of Resident Theatres) in the country. Could all 77 bring a production to one of nation’s theaters and have judges assess them? Which theater would host all this? If it’s a proscenium house, and your show was staged on a thrust, you’d have to be reconfigure it, which means work. Even if you did, more likely than not, the production would lose something in the re-staging.

And which production would a theater bring? Let’s say that a theater did a great production of The Good Soldier Schweik in April, but the Theatrical World Series isn’t until November, when the production would have been long closed, and the actors had scattered to the four winds. So do you bring what you just happen to be doing that November, even if it’s a just-okay production of Noises Off? And would a play production be judged in the same category as a musical -- or should theaters bring in one of each? Now we’re up to 154 entries.

Too complicated, too complicated. And even if, by a hundred million miracles, 77 theaters were each simultaneously able to bring a production to a certain theater, no more than three shows a day could be scheduled, which would mean almost a month-long competition. That would mean plenty of food and shelter costs for everyone. Nope, as Sam Byck sings in Assassins, “It’s never gonna happen, is it?”

And let’s be frank: How much interest and civic pride would possibly be gained from a theater’s winning? I still recall a woman I spoke to nearly 16 years ago at the opening night party of The Who’s Tommy. She was from La Jolla, where the show originated, and was as proud as Gaston because her local theater had provided Broadway with this wonderful property. Sure, but how many Broadway theatergoers who attended the show ever knew that La Jolla got the ball rolling, or gave a thought to the show’s origins? Once it was co-opted by Broadway, it became a Broadway show. End of story.

So the civic pride that sports fans routinely have is missing in our art form. One company, though, should have had it: Theatresports, of which you may have heard, for there are franchises around the world. Theatresports specializes in improvisation, though founder Keith Johnstone had an additional and smart idea. Instead of just having one group of improvvers face an audience and say, “May I have a household object, please?” he’d pit two teams of improvvers against each other. Three judges would assess each team’s work, awarding them anywhere from one to 10 points, the way Olympic judges do. After the first team beat the second team, two new teams would come on stage; the winner of the second match would face the winner of the first, and a champion would be crowned.

Not a bad idea, but at least here in New York, our local edition of Theatresports chose to name its teams by arbitrary if fanciful names. One night, I remember “Prav Duh” played “Improv Imps.” At each performance, new team names were devised, and though many were clever, there was no continuity from one performance to the next, so audience members really didn’t have anyone for whom to root, and certainly no one with whom they could become emotionally involved, the way, say, Los Angeles fans are with their Dodgers.

I told the Theatresports New York powers-that-be that they were squandering an important opportunity. Instead of just having silly/witty names for each team, they could get their audience to bond with the teams if they named them after the places from which their customers hailed. Call the teams Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, or - even better - the Upper West Side, Chelsea, and SoHo. This way, everyone (save tourists) would automatically and immediately have a vested and rooting interest in a team.

Well, no one listened, and if the New York chapter of Theatresports is still in business, I haven’t heard about it in years. I’m very sorry they didn’t try the geographical gambit, for had they done it, at least we would have had, even in a small venue, the type of rooting that they routinely have in sports venues.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com