Sport is life. It is the most vivid form of being alive, at any rate in public. Sport's triumphs and disasters, joys and sorrows, shame and glory have an intensity impossible to find elsewhere on a regular basis and it acquires an added meaning and importance from sport's essential triviality. Sport may be said to be the precise opposite of death.

That is why deaths in sport are so profoundly shocking, so uniquely affecting. Death is not supposed to happen here. The essentially infantile nature of sport makes sporting deaths particularly hard to bear. Death is never fair, but deaths in sport have an unfairness that seems almost malicious. An athlete is necessarily young, necessarily in possession of a majestic and obedient body. Everything about a top athlete shouts about life and the love of it. Such people seem, to those of us who watch, to have an almost unfair amount of life, to be almost unfairly blessed with beauty and talent. They seem to be immune to the problems we face in our own lives.

It seems impossible that they should die. But they do, and when it happens it is something that touches us more deeply than you would have thought possible from the death of a stranger.

The story of the eight players who died in Munich 50 years ago is profoundly important to all of us who follow sport, even more so to anyone who has an association with Manchester United. It is right that this is so.

United will never escape from the events of that day, nor would they wish to. That is the way it is with bereavement. When the awful pains of grief have gone, we are left with a sweet sadness that we wish never to lose; good memories of people who, even in death, remain part of our lives.

There is nothing remotely unhealthy or wrong about this. It is not a matter of harping on about things, priding yourself on grief or defining yourself by your own tears. The fact is that we are all, individuals and institutions, shaped as much by what we have lost as by what we have found. In the strange antagonisms of footballing culture, Manchester United are in some ways resented for the events of Munich, as if Munich had given them an unfair advantage. Players and supporters are regularly taunted on the subject, as if the continued sadness about a 50-year-old loss were some kind of affectation.

It is nothing of the kind. It is part of the fabric of the club and of football itself. It carries with it vivid mythologies: the greatest team that ever was, the greatest player that ever drew breath, all killed before they could claim what was rightfully theirs. The story is of lack of fulfilment, of matchless individual and corporate talent, of eight lives. And all so young, all of them Babes.

The death of a practising athlete must always bring us up short. The recent death of Phil O'Donnell, the Motherwell player, was as shocking and unfair as any death in sport. In 1967 Tommy Simpson, the cyclist, died while climbing Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France, fuelled by drugs and competitive madness. He left the legend of his last words: “Put me back on my bike.” In fact, this is an invented speech, but it is one that captures the blessed futility of sport and the incontestable nature of death.

In 1972, at the Olympic Games in Munich, a place too much associated with sporting deaths, five Israel athletes were murdered by terrorists espousing the Palestinian cause, along with four coaches and two officials. In 1979, 15 contestants were killed in the Fastnet yacht race when a storm sprang up out of nowhere, it seemed. In 1980 Johnny Owen - the Merthyr Matchstick - died after a boxing match and 46 days in a coma.

In 1994 Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, the grand prix drivers, were killed in separate accidents during the same weekend at Imola. Senna's death was particularly disturbing; he was a triple world champion, he was so good that his talent seemed a matter of divine intervention. He seemed indestructible, another order of being, and he had a vision of himself as a man uniquely blessed. His death seemed not so much unfair as a reversal of natural laws.

That year, Andrés Escobar, the Colombia defender, was shot dead. He had scored an own goal in a football World Cup match against the United States, a strange, almost surreal fixture from which the truth has yet to emerge. Colombia, seen by many - Pelé included - as among the tournament favourites, were eliminated at the group stage. Escobar paid the price for his country's disappointment.

In a strange echo of United's loss, 18 Zambia footballers were killed when their plane crashed on the way to Senegal for a World Cup qualifier in 1993. This was also a golden generation, one that might have made an impact at the World Cup the next year. And in 1999 there were five deaths in three-day eventing, unrelated accidents in a year when the sport seemed nothing less than cursed. Peta Beckett was one of those who died; her indisputable loveliness made her death seem almost unbearably unfair. All deaths diminish us, but all sporting deaths have a diminishing effect that cannot be found elsewhere.

These deaths interrupt the cheerful and trivial routines of sport. They destroy the illusion that sport is immune from the unpleasantness of everyday life, that sport is special, that people who do sport are let off the tribulations that you and I must suffer.

The childlike way we respond to sport makes us unprepared for the intrusion of death into our world. We see our athletes not only as human beings who eat and breathe and bleed like the rest of us, but also as characters who enact undying mythologies for us. They are not only Duncan and Ayrton and Tommy, they are also Hercules and Odysseus and Agamemnon.

The eight Manchester United players who died in Munich have created a thing of perfection. Instead of memories of real deeds, they left an imperishable legend of beauty and glory, a team who could never lose, the greatest team ever. And if this is resented by those with parochial allegiances, it harms only those that do the resenting. The legend continues with the achievements of the team of 1968 - a belated glory, a tribute to the dead and a celebration of the sadness and the joy of life.

All football clubs see themselves as special; each one is indeed unique. Its specialness is the pride of its supporters and the resentment of its rivals. Manchester United were defined by the events of Munich. The events themselves may be half-forgotten until it is time for an anniversary retelling, a story told by old people, glimpsed in grainy photographs, half-incomprehensible to those who were not around at the time.

But the sense of specialness is a vivid, living, breathing thing at Manchester United. It is something that has helped them to their dominance over the past two decades - and it is the legacy of the events of Munich 50 years ago.