North Kingstown High junior Elizabeth Beisel’s story is refreshing.

AFP/Getty Images / Greg Wood

Why are sports great?

Elizabeth Beisel, that’s why.

For it’s easy to get jaded these days with sports. The salaries are almost obscene in this day and age, where almost every day every newspaper in the country is full of stories about economic woe. Too many athletes seem to live inside some cocoon of entitlement, thinking that what they do is no doubt right up there with finding a cure for cancer.

Professional games cost too much, as if someone always has his hand in your wallet, gouging you for overpriced tickets, overpriced hot dogs, overpriced everything, and that’s before you almost have to take out a mortgage to park your car. It’s all big business, the commerce always in your face, and it’s easy to get jaded with all of it.

Then along comes Beisel, this 15-year-old junior-to-be at North Kingstown High School, and it makes you believe in sports all over again.

Because let’s get serious here.

Some kid from North Kingstown is not supposed to be in the Olympics. Some kid from North Kingstown is supposed to be spending her summer swimming in Narragansett and hanging out on the sea wall with her friends, not swimming for the United States team in Beijing, on national TV no less, on the biggest sports stage in the world. Some kid swimmer from North Kingstown is supposed to have pictures of Olympic swimmers on her bedroom wall, not actually be on the team with them.

Women swimmers on the Olympic team are supposed to be from some prestigious swim club in Southern California, some place where there is both history and tradition, right? Women swimmers in the Olympics are supposed to have spent their childhoods in a pool, often sent away from home for extensive training, either that or home-schooled so they have more time for practice.

Beisel is different.

Could you make up her story?

Not really.

Not unless you were writing some script for little kids, part fact and part fiction, some little inspirational tale to tell kids that they can be anything they want to be, and even then you’d know it was all one big reach, a pie-in-the-sky story. Hollywood loves the million-to-one shot, but the reality is that that’s Hollywood, the story about as real as the fake sets in the background.

Then along comes this kid from North Kingstown, who spent last winter swimming on her high school swim team, which, rest assured, is a long way away from Beijing Olympics.

And that’s why sports are great.

Because you never know.

They are not some reality TV show, with its writers and its staged drama and its endless takes, however real they want us to think it is. They are not some movie, full of actors mouthing someone else’s script. They are not just some story, manipulated for the greatest emotional impact.

They are real, the best stories of all.

And just when you think you’ve heard them all, and seen them all, just when you think that you can’t be surprised anymore, some high school kid comes out of nowhere and makes the Olympic team, and you realize that there is a never-ending supply of unbelievable stories.

And that this is the true beauty of sport.

We first heard of Beisel when she was just a high school freshman, this teenage wunderkind who has grown up in a town that doesn’t even have an indoor swimming pool, and first began swimming as a young kid at a program at URI. This past February she swam in the Interscholastic League tournament at URI, where she was asked by an opponent for her autograph.

But if at one level she was trying to have as normal an adolescence as possible, in her other life she was becoming one of the top female swimmers in the country. In the spring of her freshman year in high school, she went to the world championships in Australia, and last summer she won four national titles at the U.S. juniors.

Then it was back to her sophomore year at North Kingstown High School, as she already lived in parallel universes.

That’s the plot outline of her story, and it’s an unbelievable one.

The best stories always are.

And the best thing about them?

They keep coming, as if delivered by Central Casting. Everything changes, but the kids keep coming, complete with a blank slate upon which to write their stories. In this Olympics we also have Demetrius Andrade, a Providence 20-year-old who has toiled in the relative anonymity of amateur boxing for what seems like years now. This, too, is his moment, his time, as he tries to become the first American welterweight in 20 years to win a gold medal.

That’s the enduring power of sport, the realization that incredible odds can be overcome, dreams can indeed come true. That’s the thing to remember when you feel jaded and worn down by all the ostentatious trappings that surround so much of sport these days.

Because you never know. Some 15-year-old from North Kingstown, who was swimming in the R.I. state high school meet last February, finished fourth in the Olympics in the 400 individual medley Sunday, one of those stories you couldn’t have made up if you had sat down with a bunch of scriptwriters.

Why are sports great?

Elizabeth Beisel, that’s why.

breynold@projo.com