One of the most comforting things about watching sports is knowing that there are rules. Sure, caveats abound: Athletes and coaches will often try to evade those rules or rewrite them to their own benefit, and all rules come with their own institutional biases and blind spots. Sports are not the meritocracy its biggest boosters tell themselves it is; sports egalitarianism may be an aspiration, but it has never been a reality and it never will be. Sports are unfair just like life is.

But nevertheless, there are rules. There is a field of play, with boundaries and end lines. There is an opponent, a goal, an achievable objective. There is a scoreboard, on which points are tallied, and when the game is completed, there is a winner and there is a loser. There is clarity of purpose and, perhaps most important, ultimate resolution: The game ends, and then we all go on to do something else. (Probably watch another game.)

The Olympics are enjoyable for many reasons, but ostensibly, they’re supposed to be the platonic-ideal incarnation of sports as a force for unity in a world that discourages it. More often, though, the Olympics reflect not our world’s ideals but instead our true selves. And I’m not sure that’s ever been more plainly displayed than by the current curling scandal that has enveloped these Games, where we risk an international incident between Canada and Sweden … over curling.

To catch you up: In a preliminary match, a Canadian player named Marc Kennedy was accused by a Swedish opponent of “double-touching” the curling stone — essentially tapping it after it passes something called a “hog line,” allowing Kennedy to (theoretically) control where the stone goes past the line,........

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