We sure do celebrate our independence with pompous pomp, showing it off to our neighboring nations like a self-absorbed selfie snapper on social media. (Can they make a “Dislike” option?)

But let’s be honest, the truths are self-evident that all men and women are created equal — endowed with an unwavering, overwhelming dependence on … sports. As such, on Independence Day, I’m putting my John Hancock on the “Declaration of Independence,” because there’s nothing more American — besides Japanese men devouring Nathan’s hot dogs — than this intoxicating fixation.

Even upon the moment we wake up, we feel naked in pajamas — empty and outsiders until we scoop up our iPhones like Ronnie Hillman fumbles and catch up on sports scoops. Breakfast is served in 140 characters, feeding us with information and insight we missed after falling asleep to soothing lullabies by Linda Cohn.

We all have jobs or families or that stuff — but really, these are just minor diversions to balance out our obsession with all things sports. Yogis would say it’s symmetry; Yogi would say, “I don’t know what a symmetry is, but I bet there’s a whole forest of them somewhere.”

Life’s lifeblood is our teams. You have a team. Everybody has a team. It’s vital information about us. It should go on our driver’s licenses. Maybe it’s your college team, and to this day orange will always be burnt and red is an insipid description of scarlet. You wouldn’t dare admit to your boss the amount of minutes you spend perusing message boards and blogs about the heated recruitment of some tall teen half your age (though, to be fair, your boss probably logs a similar amount of minutes amid this minutiae). And no matter how grown up you are, and how many diapers you’ve changed and mortgages you’ve paid, you’re forever juvenilely sickened when you suddenly hear the name of your rival school, “Iowa” or “Pitt” or “UCLA” literally and figuratively spelled with four letters.

Or perhaps your team is your pro team, the franchise that has the responsibility (honor, perhaps) to represent your hometown to the nation. You dress to games like you’re an ankle away from going from the second row to the secondary. You name your pets after your favorite players, maybe even a kid or two (Banks and Maddux Ringo, for instance, live in Thornton). You plan plans around games. You unabashedly say “we” like your talking about your family or something. At your 6-year-old’s play, you sit as impatient as a 6-year-old, covertly refreshing the score on your phone.

Or perhaps your team is your fantasy team, the Jewlowitzkis or Clady Gaga, and you can’t go an hour without checking for news about some dude’s deltoid injury, and you can’t go two hours without telling someone at work about your stupid team, as if they care, at all, about how you strategically snatched Tyler Matzek off the waiver wire. But darn it, it defines you.

We depend on sports for entertainment — games and replays and highlights and YouTubes and retweeted GIFs. Seemingly every human has a sports movie in their list of favorite movies, and you can’t go a day without hearing someone quote Ty Webb or Pedro Cerrano or Ivan Drago. Sports links families, passion passed down to sons and daughters like heirlooms. Sports are just games, sure, but they occasionally can be bigger — therapy or inspiration. Just ask New Yorkers after 9/11 or New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina. Sports teach us about love before our first kisses. And while winning is everything, we need to endure the losses, if only because they make the feeling of winning that much more rewarding.

And sports makes mortals into immortals, just because of their ability to throw a ball or do something surreal, and you sit on your couch in the same jersey as your son, in wonderment, wondering just how these silly games have entranced us so.

Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/hochman