T he period after this Sunday’s Super Bowl clash between the Bears and the — ahem — team from Indianapolis is a cold and empty one for those of us who obsess over both America’s most popular sport and its national pastime.

Eight long weeks from the NFL’s crowning spectacle and the first pitch of baseball season. Of course there’s college basketball and the always-exciting NCAA tournament, but that doesn’t heat up until mid-March. And I guess the NBA, if you’re really desperate for something remotely diverting. There is another alternative for some of those lazy weekend afternoons. Read one, or preferably both, of Michael Lewis’ masterworks of sports reporting.

Lewis published the much-heralded “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” in 2003. It is the best book on baseball I have ever read. And I’ve been reading about baseball since before Cal Ripken Jr. fielded his first grounder for the Orioles.

“Moneyball” is about the efforts of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane to find undervalued players for his cash-strapped team. Beane’s system is successful yet highly controversial within the esoteric fraternity of baseball players, coaches and scouts — mostly because it eschews gut instincts about a player’s physical prowess. Instead, it rigorously evaluates what each man actually does on the field, with a particular emphasis on how both batters and pitchers manage balls and strikes. Lewis crunches plenty of numbers in “Moneyball,” but the book enlightens and inspires with narratives about real-life fat catchers, awkward pitchers and slow outfielders who manage to succeed alongside peers who are more abundantly gifted, chemically enhanced or, in the case of someone like Barry Bonds, both.

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All it takes is for someone like Beane to recognize and nurture the special physical or mental skill they already possess. The story of Michael Oher, the focus of Lewis’ “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” is one you just wouldn’t buy if someone tried to sell it to you as a screenplay. Big Mike is a poor black kid from the worst family in the worst part of Memphis. He sleeps on friends’ floors or in vacant flats to keep from going back to foster homes. A decent guy from the neighborhood drags Big Mike across town to a prestigious private Christian high school in hopes that it will give him a scholarship to play basketball.

The school’s football coach soon realizes that 16-year-old Big Mike — with his incredible size, long arms, lightning reflexes and baffling foot speed — is a natural prospect to become one of the highest-paid men on an NFL team: The offensive line’s left tackle. That player is the rare “freak of nature” who can ably thwart defensive players charging at a quarterback’s very expensive rear end. Ravens fans are well aware of the importance of such freaks, having had the privilege to watch for the last decade the great Jonathan Ogden, who is featured in one chapter in “The Blind Side.” As in “Moneyball,” Lewis goes deep into coaching strategy and the economics of the game in a way that should fascinate someone who isn’t even a casual fan of the game.

But the real story is how Oher discovers himself with the help of the Tuohy family. The Tuohys — the very rich, very evangelical and very white Tuohys who have a daughter Big Mike’s age and a younger son — are buying Big Mike clothes and letting him crash on their couch before anyone realizes his monetary worth.

At every turn they give offer Big Mike unconditional love with no expectation of anything in return, to the point they adopt him as their son. It’s hard to believe that such love exists, but Lewis’s amazing book shows that it can.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.