The history of our world has been shaped by the kaleidoscope of mistakes that human beings have made. Do a Google search for the word error and you’ll get roughly 121,000,000 results, give or take. Mistakes, in all their forms, permeate the many facets of our wrong lives so much that we have created literally dozens of other words to mean them.

You have your blunders, bloopers, bloomers, balks, boners, bobbles, and bungles, and that’s just the B. Never mind the mistakes, the missteps, the misconceptions, the miscalculations, and the misunderstandings.

Writer James Joyce said, “A man’s mistakes are his portals of discovery.”

But Albert Einstein said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

And that would explain why, even though we’ve already opened roughly 121,000,000 of Joyce’s “portals of discovery,” we keep making, repeating, and repeating the original mistakes all over again.

If Winston Churchill was right when he said, “All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes,” then we are a society of extraordinary idiots. And of course, the sports world is far from immune. In fact, it might best be described as a forest overgrown with fools beyond a pruner’s relief shears.

We’ve all heard of that poor chump in our office who accidentally hit “reply all” when his overly personal email was meant for only a pair of sympathetic eyes. And we’ve all laughed a little at his embarrassment, as long as his job punishment didn’t go beyond the ridiculous co-worker requirement.

But have you heard of the case of Steelers line coach Larry Zierlein? As probably happens from time to time with a professional sports organization that has Internet access, Zierlein sent an email that had a pornographic video attached. But what doesn’t often happen, and what makes Zierlein’s email stand out in the vast sea of ​​adult-oriented exchanges online, is that Zierlein accidentally sent the video to a large list of league recipients that included the general managers of the 32 teams, their secretaries. and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Zierlein kept her job, but suffered more humiliation than any Southwest Airlines “Want to Get Away” commercial could represent. “It’s tough because I made an unforgivable mistake,” Zierlein said. “It was difficult at first for the organization. They had to explain and pass … and my family, so they’re going to have to listen.”

Let Zierlein bread be your cautionary tale.

We’ve all hit our heads on an open cupboard at some point, hit our toes on some kind of closing door, and stubbed our toes because, though we’ve been through it a thousand times before, we forgot once. of the small half step at the entrance of our kitchen. But none of those painful, humiliating everyday mishaps compare to what kicker Bill Gramatica did as a rookie in 2001. Celebrating a meaningless 42-yard field goal in the first quarter for the Arizona Cardinals who weren’t going to nowhere, Gramatica began to jump as if his feet were on fire.

This was the standard Gramatica celebration after kicks of any length or importance, including extra points. But what wasn’t standard, and what made Gramatica a laughingstock, and secured him a permanent spot on the list of dumbest sports injuries of all time, was the torn ACL that resulted in his jump, putting end of his season.

And we’ve all, at least once, been late meeting a boss or teacher’s deadline on a work or school assignment. But it’s also probably safe to say that afterwards we weren’t criticized by the local and national media, as the Minnesota Vikings were when they delayed making their first-round pick in 2003. The Vikings had the seventh pick in April’s draft, but by letting time run out before submitting their pick to league officials, they didn’t actually pick until ninth.

When, at each annual NFL draft, the commissioner says, “[insert team name here] it’s on the clock”, between any and all selections, you better take that clock seriously.

These mistakes and misjudgments fueled by Einstein’s theory of infinite human stupidity are mere drops in a bottomless bucket overflowing with unadulterated stupidity. And really, at the end of the day in these few examples here, there was very little collateral damage. The parties harmed by these wrong turns in reason were contained in the small group of offenders.

But of course, failures in brain function are not always benign. For every ill-advised internal email that gets deleted and then forgotten, and for every self-inflicted knee injury that fails to make a difference in the final standings of the season, there are foolish decisions with considerable consequences. Moves made or not made, things said and done, and mistakes in strategy that have at times altered the course of sports history in dramatic and significant ways.

Few vocations are as committed to keeping track of the triumphs and failures of the past as is the world of sport. The Encyclopedia of Baseball chronicles every at-bat in baseball history: the home runs and the strikeouts. Pro Football Weekly tracks every win and loss, touchdown and turnover, and eventual Super Bowl champion. And if you have a basketball question related to a player, a stat, or the outcome of a game, Inside Hoops is the place to go.

But when it comes to mental errors, absurdly divergent decisions from tried-and-true practices, and unfortunate words and actions that will forever haunt the men and women who made them, the history books are remarkably silent.

Not anymore.