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The last time they tried rugby at the Olympics – Paris, 1924 – it ended in farce.

The hosts met the United States in the gold-medal match. Local fans expected a cakewalk. Instead, they were witness to a war, which quickly spread to the stands. French supporters began chucking bottles onto the field. One American player was knocked senseless by a flying cane.

When it ended in American victory, French hooligans invaded the pitch and tried to kill their friendly competition. The French team, acting as ad-hoc bodyguards, prevented a true international incident.

Owing to a (somewhat understandable) lack of interest from competitors, rugby was left off the event list in 1928.

This weekend, many Canadians will get their first look at the bowdlerized rugby that will make its debut, following a 92-year absence, at Rio 2016. This iteration of a grinding game that hasn't changed much in a century is called rugby sevens – as it features seven players a side, rather than the usual 15. This is the future of sports, perhaps in more ways than one.

When it comes to introducing new sports, the International Olympic Committee reliably gets things wrong.

A plurality of these people thought ice dancing, snowboarding and golf were good ideas. A few of them bucked for roller skating and male synchronized swimming. They cannot be trusted to know the difference between what sounds interesting and what works in an Olympic context. The guidelines are still "Higher, Faster, Stronger."

In this rare instance, they've got it right. For once, the Olympics is on the leading edge of sports, rather than staggering behind trying to figure out what all the cool kids are into or what might sell to a U.S. TV network.

People who enjoy rugby sevens will point to several things they enjoy about the sport – because it is played on a regulation field with half the number of players, it moves much more quickly. Physically, the players are built for speed rather than brutality.

There are more breakaways, which people will tell you they don't care about and secretly love, and fewer tactics, which works in the opposite way. Tournaments play out in festival atmospheres – think younger, fancy dress and day drinking.

It is one of the peculiarities of modern pop culture that concerts are becoming more like sporting events (dour, static crowds staring at the entertainment, Jesuitically recording the output on their phones) and sporting events are becoming more like concerts (people go there to get drunk, sing along with familiar songs and celebrate the act of fandom, rather than any particular result).

Rugby sevens has tapped into that shift with a good deal of success.

The World Rugby Sevens Series, which pulls into Vancouver on Saturday, will play in front of more than 60,000 people. It's the largest Canadian crowd to watch a Canadian rugby team. It's a fair bet the majority will have never seen the sport played on anything but YouTube clips.

They're there because the thing sounds new and cool, it is eternal spring out west and they serve beer all day long. Rugby's the excuse.

But finally having seen it played, they will go home with one revelatory takeaway – that a full game of team sports can happen in less time than it takes to watch a sitcom.

Rugby sevens matches feature two seven-minute halves separated by a one-minute break. It's a little south of 20 minutes total if you factor in injury time and stoppages.

Generally speaking, sports are exotropic. Everything about them is constantly expanding – the audiences, the hype, the salaries, the size of the athletes and what they're capable of doing.

That's all good, I suppose. But the games themselves are getting bigger, and there are far too many of them.

The average baseball game now lasts more than three hours. Perhaps if they were doing something for most of that time, it wouldn't seem like such a time suck. Instead, it's all guys re-velcroing their batting gloves and pitchers staring in endlessly like the answer to their problems is algebraic. Football, hockey and basketball have the same issues – endless breaks in play, too much time to talk about what is happening rather than watch something happening.

Everybody thinks the answer to an increased sports appetite is more sports. More of them, more often and for more time.

Instead, it is less.

There is a reason the NFL is the most popular game in America, and it isn't just the constant threat of devastating injury. It's that regular-season football games happen only 16 times a year. They are events.

Soccer is the world's most popular sport not just because it can be played anywhere, is elemental in its particulars and populated at the highest levels by averagely sized people as opposed to freaks.

It is because when we sit down to watch a soccer game, we know to a certainty that it will take two hours. No more. That's the limit of most people's endurance. I think that every time I watch thousands of baseball fans stand up in the seventh inning and walk out, regardless of the score. They've hit their time wall.

Rugby sevens is the bleeding edge of that impulse. The series that will be played in Vancouver is part of a global circuit – 10 cities in six months. They play 45 matches in just two days, and then they're gone.

This is sport served as a monthly presentation of amuse-bouches rather than a daily diet of bland, gut-busting meals. As viewing habits migrate from televisions to phones, this is the way people want to consume things. Just give them the most intense flavours and spare them the filler.

It's not to say rugby sevens is going to control the future. But I guarantee that something paying attention to its best lessons will.

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