I have noted, more than once, that the French are not crazy about team sports. Paris is by far the least sports-interested major city I have encountered.

That partly explains why I have not seen a live sports event — of any sort — since January 3, when I stumbled across the late stages of a French Cup match between Toulouse and Frejus-Saint-Raphael.

Toulouse beat the lower-division Cote d’Azur team 3-2.

Since then? Nothing. Which has to be some sort of personal record, over the past 50 years.

The key issue?

The group of stations available on the basic French over-the-air system … does not include any that regularly carry sports.

Looking back, that Coupe de France match I watched was available on one of the three national stations … presumably because no sports-oriented network was interested in the competition.

(It is noteworthy that France’s top-level Ligue 1 ranks fifth among the five “big” European soccer leagues in average attendance, at 21,000-plus, and is also behind Mexico — and only about 2,000 better than Major League Soccer in the U.S.)

Presumably, a motivated fan can get Ligue 1 on TV — and perhaps also the English Premier League and the German League as well as rugby, which is surprisingly popular in France, in a muted, French sort of way. In the southern half of the country, anyway.

But it has not made sense to try to upgrade the television packages in the places where we have been staying, since arriving in France on January 1. We were in the first place two weeks, and we are doing 75 days in the second.

So, left to scan, fruitlessly, over-the-air French television, and not yet willing to buy the online packages from some major competition like the NFL or NBA or Major League Baseball (and not at all sure the internet here would reliably support streaming sports) … here I sit in a sports-TV-free zone.

The French are perhaps less sports-oriented (sportif, as they call it), than the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to national or international competitions.

In part, perhaps, because they seem to be more into participatory sports than most of the world — cycling, skiing, tennis, sailing, hiking, parkour, etc.

And give them credit for that.

It just does nothing to bring any sort of sports action into what is, currently, my circumscribed viewing choices.