One of the strangest parts of writing about sports for a living is when a sports event is eclipsed by a news event. Or becomes one.

Today, Egypt, the most populous Arab country, is in revolt. And we went ahead and played the third-place game in the Asian Cup in Doha, Qatar … not all that far, physically, from Egypt. And even closer, culturally.

And, again, we let the games go on, and we’re left to wonder if that is good … or bad.

The situation in Egypt was calm when I left the UAE on Monday morning. Within 24 hours, Egypt was in an uproar, and the tension and anti-government protests have increased exponentially since; each night in the hotel, I have tuned in to see what has happened.

All day today, in the Main Media Center as well as the satellite press room at Al Sadd Stadium, where the match was played, the bulk of the flat-screen TVs were tuned to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based all-news station.

Al Jazeera may tilt anti-American and (especially) anti-Israel, but in this case the cable network deserves credit for Just Telling the Story. When the Egyptian government cut most internet and telephone ties with the outside world, Al Jazeera somehow stayed on, and did what news organizations should do at moments like this — just show the pictures and try to tell the story. CNN did it back in 1991, in the first Gulf War. This may be an equivalent moment for Al Jazeera.

People here are fixated by events in Egypt. And it comes as no surprise. If I have learned anything since arriving in the region in 2009, it is that most governments, in a broad swath from North Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Myanmar, are deeply unpopular. Just the other day, a cab driver from Sri Lanka criticized his government nonstop after I asked him, “So, where are you from?” His government, he said, was the reason he had gone from a position as a construction supervisor to driving a cab in Qatar.

Demonstrators forced out the government in Tunisia last week. Egypt’s government apparently will topple next. And it is fair to wonder where it will end.

Everything is calm in Qatar, anyway. South Korea defeated Uzbekistan 3-2 in the third-place match. The crowd of 9,000-some was into it. No one talked politics.

Is that good? Is sports a healthy antidote to woe and trouble? Or has it become a sort of 21st century opiate of the masses? If Egypt had a couple of big soccer matches this week, would any of this have happened?

The event I most clearly remember as a confluence of “big sports and big trouble” was the time just ahead of the 1988 Olympics, in Seoul, South Korea. Students then had been protesting on an almost daily basis. Confrontations between security forces and students were particularly violent.

On my first full day in the country, three or four of us “went to see the revolution.” It felt a bit wrong. Like peeking through a window at a family feud. Prurient. We heard about a planned demonstration scheduled at Yonsei University, not far from the Main Press Center, and the school had been known as the site of various clashes.

I remember the cab dropping us off once we hit the police roadblocks, and Mike Lopresti and Gregg Patton and I,  and maybe one or two others, carefully walking toward the entrance to the university. We knew we had found it when we saw a long line of hundreds of riot police, in full armor, with shields and batons.

We could hear the student protesters before we saw them, chanting … and eventually they began to march toward the very big street we were standing on. On our side of the street were the riot police. On the far side, the students. And it seemed to be an unspoken certainty that if the students went into the road, the police would react. With force.

After another hour or so of chanting on their side of the street, the students retreated. The whole time, we had been behind the police lines, and so never spoke to the students. And more than once I wondered if we had been just plain stupid, walking up to the edge of a potential riot like it was the sidelines of a football game. I still wrote about it.

And then, the Olympics began, South Korea did well, and the protests seemed to wither. At least for the duration of the Games.

Was that good? Or bad? South Koreans seem reasonably happy with their government now. So whatever happened in 1988, the Olympics may not have influenced it one way or another.

Anyway, for all those moments when sports people feel like we turn out the journalism that matters most to the Average Joe, moments like these remind us that we are, actually, and always have been, the Toy Department.