When David Tyree, unheralded wide receiver of the New York Giants, made the mythical Helmet Catch in Super Bowl XLII, fans of American football bemoaned the blasé response of sportscaster Joe Buck.

“Only one of the biggest, most improbable plays in Super Bowl history and Buck calls it like it’s a second down in the third quarter of Week 6,” noted a reader in the online mailbag of ESPN columnist Bill Simmons. And even Simmons, a diehard New England fan, had to agree. “Glad you brought this up,” he wrote in reply. “If you’re a play-by-play announcer and you can’t get excited for a play like that, then why are you doing this for a living?”

As ancient and organic as sporting events are, sports commentary is a product of modernity, particularly our postmodern desire to make every moment as memorable as it is linear, as contextualized as it is simple.

Removed from the hardwood court or the verdant field, analysts are omniscient third-person narrators that make sense of the chaos that is sports. Their goal is to insta-bronze events so that viewers the world over can have the same interpretation of the same event; they explain pick and rolls and inside-out forehands with the same ease they deign to know what players are thinking and feeling.

Analysts create, in other words, a master narrative. That way, athletics can have the tonal gloss of a history textbook, complete with an epic story that has clear causes and clear effects. “Much of the content of commentary serves to heighten listeners’ appreciation of the drama unfolding on the field of play,” writes Gordon W. Russell in Aggression in the Sports World. “Guided by commentary, viewers see conflicts … as an expression of the athletes’ intense determination to dominate or win over their opponents”.

But how necessary are analysts to our sporting experience? From personal experience, I can say I do not miss them (or notice their absence, really) when I attend football games for my hometown Baltimore Ravens. I may be shivering in the cold of winter, sandwiched between two boozers in the nosebleeds of M&T Bank Stadium, wind whipping in from the Inner Harbor—but I’m never sad to remember, almost in a jolt of pleasant surprise, that I’m not listening to Phil Simms or Dan Dierdorf “break down” what my own two eyes just saw unfold.

What I lose in not hearing these suited, coiffed men “in the booth” explain, for example, and correctly we’ll assume, that a sack on the quarterback was caused by a missed block by the fullback, or that a play-action pass succeeded because the defense saw a diehard run look, is compensated by hearing the steel-link sound pump through the stadium as we “move those chains,” fans chanting this success in unison. It is made up for by the unplanned but reliable commiseration with the fellow fans around me, decked in gothic Poe purple, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally linking arms and clutching hands in the thrall and raw tension of a big, often televised moment.

It’s compensated in seeing an American football play—an ineffable (and inscrutable, given the middling quality of most broadcasts) thing that seems to fail or succeed almost at random on television—unfold with logic and precision and even predictability before my own eyes, as piece by piece by piece of a play falls into place and rounds into form, as the fullback holds a block for two seconds but not a second more, ghosts to flat, patters his feet near the sideline expectantly, waiting for a ball to float to him for that infinitely small window of time he’s open for.

That, however, isn’t to say one has to be at a sporting event to enjoy the athletics sans announcers.

At the start of this year’s Australian Open, I was glued to my laptop to watch a tennis match between Stan Wawrinka, the second-most relevant Swissman in professional tennis (out of two), and Marcos Baghdatis, a puckish Cypriot who has been underachieving for a few years.

A second-round match between two players with a negligible shot of still being around in the tournament’s later stages—and there I was, captivated by a strange intoxicant I’d never, or rarely, felt before as a sports watcher. I was close to the action, a part of it, adrift in it. I was losing myself in its sights and sounds. I was internalizing it without commentary—eventually realizing the online channel was serving a feed with courtside audio only, which silenced the kingly if not abrasive thoughts of famous ball-folks like John McEnroe and his brother Patrick, both former players.

On this feed, all I could hear was the crowd reacting, the chair umpire calling score, the linespeople shrieking out!, the players grunting, and their sneakers squeaking across that famous blue hardcourt of Down Under.

It was so real it almost felt wrong—so real I could notice things I never had noticed before while watching one of my favorite sports. I felt I could detect the fear in the eyes of one man, Baghdatis, as he served to stay in the match. Conversely, I sensed the confidence in Wawrinka’s gait as he gunned for the break of his opponent’s serve. And I felt that the crowd in Melbourne, though thousands and thousands of miles away from me, Conversely, I could see the confidence in Wawrinka’s gait as he gunned for the break. I could feel that the crowd in Melbourne, though 7,000 miles away, shared a mind with me: Wawrinka was destined to prevail. (And he did, in fact.)

I could even, more inspiringly, sense the rabid delirium on the part of the Australians in attendance: their joy for being at a tennis match. (Did they, in truth, honestly care who won that day?)

These are the nuanced, gut-based sensations vital to experiencing sports—to being a part of the spectacular collective—that can be drowned out by analysts who give the action an all-too-obvious rhythm, meaning and arc.

“Approach the game with no preset agendas,” Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson once said, “and you’ll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts.”

Jackson was referring to players on the court (or on the diamond, or in the rink, or wherever they compete), but the thought applies to us fans too. A recommendation: If you have the chance to watch sports without the well-worn commentary, don’t pass it up. You may see less legend and more life.