Lord Gyllene was not the hero of the 1997 Grand National. Everybody was. The 60,000 people who were there at Aintree on the Saturday, and who withdrew without panic when a coded bomb warning came from the IRA, the people of Liverpool who looked after thousands of stranded race-goers, the racing people who made the decision to re-run the race 49 hours late, the horses, the jockeys and the trainers and the 20,000 people who gathered for the re-run that Monday evening, including the Prime Minister, John Major, and the Princess Royal.

All of these were the heroes of the race. But if there is a medal for only one person, it goes to Phil Sharp, the stable lad who had travelled up with one of the big-race favourites, Suny Bay. Sharp became a national archetype: the lad who stayed. He sneaked back in by himself after he had been evacuated and tended to the needs of the 100 horses left stranded.

For there comes a time in sport when the result really doesn't matter all that much. It doesn't matter who wins when a significant victory has been won before the referee blows his whistle, the umpire says play, the starter releases the runners.

Instead, there is a massive relief that we can play sport at all, coupled with a terrible anxiety that it might all go wrong. Sport, so often an arena in which we seek the exceptional, the extraordinary and the remarkable, becomes, in these circumstances, a thing to be treasured for its normality, its ordinariness, its utterly humdrum qualities.

In India, sport's very triviality is today a matter of importance. England had two good sessions in the first Test yesterday, but India had the best of the third and look to have the edge. Isn't it great to say that? Isn't it good to be counting runs rather than corpses?

Isn't it good to talk about 229 for five and Andrew Strauss's 123 and wasn't Paul Collingwood unlucky and four wickets in the last session and what was Kevin Pietersen thinking about? Every one of these trivial matters has a deep and important meaning. It means they shall not pass. It means they shall not win. It means life goes on.

Sport and terrorism are two of the main growth industries of the past 40-odd years and it is inevitable that they have from time to time come together. More often than not, sport has responded by carrying on. Some will argue that this is mostly about not wanting to lose money; others will argue that it's all about politics; no one will argue that such points are not a factor in the decision to carry on.

But all the same, carrying on feels right. Defiance feels right. The restoration of normal life feels right: not crassly and coarsely and insensitively, not in any pretence that the sport is more important than matters of life and death, but because the return to sport after a period of terror is both a blow against terrorism and the sort of comforting normality we need after times of trouble.

In 2005, the London bombings of July 7 gave us a shattering example of witless and gratuitous terror. Two weeks later, the Ashes series began at Lord's and the same day, an attempted repeat bombing failed.

We watched the cricket just the same and afterwards, with the transport gone crazy, we all walked gamely for miles in search of some way of getting home. The next day, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead at Stockwell Tube station by panicking policemen. We watched the cricket at Lord's; not callously, not in denial, but certainly aware that if the aim of terrorism is terror, it wasn't working as well as the terrorists had hoped.

In 1972, Scotland and Wales refused to go to Dublin to play their matches in the Five Nations Championship. The Troubles were at their height and they handed a victory to the IRA on a plate. The next year, the England team went. Consider this: an England team, playing in Dublin during the Troubles, were given a five-minute standing ovation as soon as they walked on to the pitch.

That told you something about what Ireland thought about the IRA; about Ireland's soul-deep hunger for peace, for normality, for all those things summed up in the trivialities of sport. Ireland won a tight match 18-9 and afterwards, the England captain, John Pullin, said: “We may not be much good but at least we turn up.”

The England cricket team returned to an India full of troubles in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, as recounted in these pages on November 29. Many of the players wanted to go home and, in a fraught hotel-room meeting, the tour manager, Tony Brown, flung all the passports on to a bed and said that anyone who wanted to go home could “piss off”. The tour went ahead, four Tests were played, and sport had triumphed once again.

Not so in the wake of 9/11. The golfers of the United States refused to travel to Europe to play in the Ryder Cup of that year, 2001, and the event was postponed for 12 months. It wasn't clear whether this rout represented the traditional American umbilical connection to the homeland, or an equally traditional American conception of world geography, in which all places that are not the United States are the abode of monsters.

The sport continued after the pipe bomb exploded at the Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996, which killed two and injured 111. Rather more questionably, the Olympic Games of 1972 carried on without interruption during the killings, the prolonged siege and then eventual airport shoot-out in Munich, a time in which it appeared that the allocation of gold medals was more important to the International Olympic Committee than the murder of athletes.

But in most cases, the decision of sport to carry on in the aftermath of terror feels right, and is right. It is seldom that sport has been the specific target of terrorism: Munich and the bogus bombs of the Grand National are about as close as it gets. If sport ever became a regular and specific target of terror, we would have to rethink everything.

But it is not. All the same, sport cannot take place without the security industry dominating most leading events, and we accept this as a matter of routine. We are aware that the price of fighting terrorism is eternal vigilance; we are in the process of learning about the price of eternal vigilance.

Sport is a weapon against terror; a weapon on the side of the ordinary, the amusing, the trivial. That is not to deny, still less to trivialise the devastation caused by the terrorists, rather, it is to put them in perspective. There are wicked people in the world, but there are also people prepared to graft out 123 runs in a day's cricket. Sport can't defeat terrorism unaided, but it can certainly celebrate the truth that terrorism doesn't create anything but terror. So three cheers for the England cricket team, and three more for the India team; I hope they both win. But then they already have.