Seventy-four are dead in Egypt, according to the government, after violence between soccer fans of the Cairo club Al Ahly and the Al Masry club of Port Said.

This is by no means the first instance of dozens of deaths at soccer matches in the past three decades. In a three-piece package in The National for Friday a.m., we note 10 instances of at least 39 people dying at soccer matches since 1982. Some of it in rioting, like at Heysel Stadium in 1985 and in Egypt on Wednesday night, but also because of fire, stadium collapses and, especially, stampedes.

North Americans do not get this. And it’s a fairly exotic concept, when you think about it: You go to a sports event and dozens of you come back … dead.

My colleague Gary Meenaghan took a trip down a bloody memory lane in this story, a review of what we know about the Egyptian disaster — which Fifa president Sepp Blatter called “a black day for football” — with reference to several other disasters.

And a regular contributor to the sports section, the Englishman Will Batchelor, in this comment piece suggests that an atmosphere of belligerent posturing, which pervades soccer matches in much of the world, is often to blame for deaths that follow.

Writes Batchelor: “The truth we seek to avoid is that violence can feel like terrific fun, when it is only at the ritualistic, posturing stage. At football, a nine-stone (125 pounds) weakling can stand with arms aloft, beckoning a thousand men to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”, without fear of the ridicule that would surely follow if he tried the same stunt anywhere else.”

Batchelor added: “And, like most football fans, I claim to abhor aggression while also enjoying the cauldron-like atmosphere it creates. … When that tension spills over into actual violence, even death, respectable fans wring our hands and express regret that some hotheads crossed the line between ritual and realty. But we are all complicit in nurturing the febrile atmosphere in which such mistakes are made.”

And in this op-ed piece, an Egyptian contributor suggests that “74 dead in Port Said” is a function of a fractious, nervous, unsettled society still trying to find its way after toppling Hosni Mubarak. It also seems to give some credence to the “conspiracy theory” explanation which Batchelor condemns in his piece.

This is almost impossible for a North American to grasp. The U.S. and Canada stage thousands of major sports events every year, and nobody dies, aside from the random drunk guy who falls out of the stands, or some awful accident like the man who fell over the outfield fence while reaching for a ball thrown to him by Josh Hamilton and died at a Texas Rangers game.

Some of the deaths are about efficient access to entrances and exits. In many parts of the world, little thought is given to this.

Some of it is about cultures where pushing and shoving to get where you want is not a social taboo, as it is in the U.S.  Though we should note that the English practically invented “lining up” … and they are represented in some pretty awful soccer disasters.

Some of it is about a culture that does not equate sports with life or death. If Americans are less willing to die for their team, or kill for it, well, thank goodness for not being that sort of ultra fan.