Devotion is the word for the readership All for the Game attracts. Nora Sakavic writes at the junction of sport and found family, where the team is the plot and the plot is a group of damaged people deciding, against their own instincts, to stay.
The King’s Men carries the closing weight of that sequence, and it is the sort of fiction people press on their friends with a warning attached. It is not gentle. It is also, for a great many listeners, unforgettable, which is why the average score attached to it here sits so high.