You either understand The HD Effect or you will. You sit there, smug and satisfied, knowing that your old TV is perfectly fine, and then something happens. It breaks, something, and you go to high definition. And you spend a weekend watching The Rodent Network, because rodents are interesting when they’re all nice and sharply defined.

This has been my story, too. I didn’t resist high definition any more than I resist numbers changing on calendar pages; I just didn’t see a need to upgrade. No one in this household watches much television, and I’m the only one who rents movies. Those are usually late-night affairs anyway, on my convenient computer monitor, which sits a few feet from my convenient recliner. I was a content standard-definition sort of guy.

But here’s a funny thing: As I’ve gotten older, my eyes seem to like bigger things. Bigger text. Bigger pictures. Bigger monitors. Weird.

So six months or so ago I went bigger once again, and as I was setting up my new 24-inch computer monitor I noticed a couple of things. HDMI input. 1080p resolution. Those sorts of things. And being a fiddler by nature, enjoying the art of jury-rigged electronics and wasting time, I started to play. Switched out my cable box. Dug an old stereo system out of the garage. Bought a couple of cables. Tried out this new HD world.

Listen: Let me tell you about rodents. They’re FASCINATING.

This explains why I’ve been renting a lot of Blu-Rays lately. It also explains why I watched two popcorn movies over the weekend, dumb CGI things with Swiss cheese plots and lots of explosions. I assume I’ll get over this.

But I didn’t think I’d actually watch “The Blind Side,” even though I rented it and it had been sitting on my desk for days. I knew what it was. I have respect for Michael Lewis, who wrote the book, and I like Sandra Bullock as much as everyone else does.

But I know sports movies, know that they’re diagrammed on white boards with emotional graph lines, and know how they end. There are plenty of admirable true stories around sports, filled with courage and redemption and tragedy and triumph. And they’re all very cinematic. The problem is they’ve been filmed already and it was called “Hoosiers.” Game over.

I watched it, though, sucked in by bright and shiny technology and Sandra, and at least for the first hour I enjoyed it. Whatever.

There’s another story, though, that I’m reminded of today. Sort of peripherally about sports, but definitely about courage and redemption and tragedy and triumph.

I noticed this accidentally, too. Just one of those “On This Day In History” things, something I spotted a couple of weeks ago, blurry and just starting my morning. A little calendar trivia, although there was nothing trivial about it.

It was 15 years ago, May 27, 1995, that the accident happened, still for unclear reasons; a spooked horse, a tangled bridle, a quirk of mass and gravity. And nine years later it ended, the story, and I woke up one October morning, a column already written, and read the news.

We live in a culture of clay feet, and I’m not immune. Show me a noble story and I’ll find you another one, a darker one, a human one. A flawed one. You know what I’m talking about. Dig into the history of any hero deep enough and you’ll find stuff you might wish you hadn’t. Character defects, nasty habits, offensive philosophies, secret lives, secrets in general.

I’m not sure I care much about this. My personal heroes tend to be people I know, people who handle adversity not by enduring it but by approaching it in brave ways. These are small stories without glamour, without attention, without movies.

Look: You’ll like “The Blind Side,” probably, if you haven’t seen it. It’s a nice story, warm and fuzzy, inspirational, funny. Just because I have a thing for Gene Hackman films doesn’t make me an authority on sports movies.

It’s just that I noticed that it’s been 15 years since Christopher Reeve got dealt a bad hand, a freak accident that might have only resulted in bruises but instead left him the poster child for irony. A career built on playing an iconic superhero ended with a paralyzed body, dependent on others for his very breath.

And I remembered how I felt that morning, six years ago, when I learned that he had died. How I tossed out my column and wrote something else, wrote about movie memories but also my feeling that one day, some people will be able to walk because Christopher Reeve couldn’t, and refused to accept that.

As I say, approaching adversity is where I tend to find my heroes. Not so much in movies. Which is also ironic, in a way, considering that years ago, for a couple of hours, I sort of believed that a man could fly.