Even Superman died. Superman. The guy was more powerful than a speeding bullet, was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and had only one known weakness. Yet he died, and people accepted it. Why then, is it so hard for us to accept that athletes die?

Why is it that an already unbelievable event — a plane crashing into an uptown Manhattan building — becomes even more unbelievable when the pilot turns out to be a baseball player?

In the “Sandlot,” Babe Ruth told Benny Rodriguez that “heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” For fans, this has always been true about our athletes — they never die. Professional athletes are supposed to be invincible.

But we have all tragically learned again, this week, how false that is.

I didn’t know Cory Lidle, but because he was a Yankee I feel like I did. The sight of seeing a plane crash into a Manhattan building sent chills down my spine, but for some reason it became worse and more surreal when I found out that it was Lidle flying the plane. A guy I watched on TV just a week ago, a guy who I had on my fantasy baseball team: now gone from the earth.

There’s a reason why no human man can hold back the tears during Gale Sayer’s speech about Brian Piccolo in “Brian’s Song.” There’s also a reason why we stare in disbelief every time Bertier’s car gets T-boned in “Remember the Titans.” In movies, just like in life, we want our athletes to be bulletproof. Paul Pierce surviving being stabbed 11 times is not the exception, it is the rule. Ben Roethlisberger can survive crashing his motorcycle without a helmet because he seems untouchable by death. We don’t see these incidents as being near-death because it is impossible for us to fathom our heroes as being mortal.

Sports are the ultimate form of escapism, an entire culture based on games. People look to these games as a way to escape from everyday life; no one wants to associate death with a baseball field or a soccer pitch.

But Cory Lidle is dead, and despite the surreality of it all, the plane crash was not a part of some movie.

We spend our days criticizing Alex Rodriguez and Terrell Owens, forgetting that they are real people just like us. We tend to forget that A-Rod could be gone tomorrow just as much as any one of us could.

Pat Tillman was a former Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and a stand-out safety for the Arizona Cardinals, but he will always be remembered because he died defending our country in Afghanistan. Thousands have died in our current war, but aside from those from my hometown who have unfortunately lost their lives in the conflict, Tillman and his brother are the only deceased that I can name. I remember Tillman in the same thought as a kid from high school, because as an athlete, I knew Tillman. And I thought he was invincible, I thought he was incapable of dying.

When the sports world is interrupted by a real world incident, it changes everyone’s perspective. A loss to the Tigers just isn’t as important anymore.

The cruel realities of sports hit me when I heard ESPN’s Pedro Gomez report on the goings-on in the Oakland A’s locker room Wednesday night. Lidle was a member of the A’s just a few years back, and despite a somber mood in the clubhouse, the team would play that night. Oakland third baseman Eric Chavez, who was a teammate of Lidle’s during his time in Oakland, had this to say: “We’re professionals. We know we have to play tonight and that’s just the way it is.”

Few jobs but those in professional sports would ask people to go to work hours after the tragic death of a colleague. But we want our athletes to be real-life supermen, and playing is the best way for them to make us forget that they are not.