When a centuries-old sport suddenly gains enormous popularity, it can also have literary reasons.
This is certainly so in the case of Quidditch, a flying broom-based ball game whose roots date back to the early Middle Ages.
In his standard work "Quidditch Through the Ages", the sports historian Kennilworthy Whisp writes about the gradual spread of the game and gives evidence of its reception, such as the poem written around 1400 by a Norwegian poet named Ingolfr the Iambic, which begins with the stanza: "O Lust der Chasing as I fly through the skies / The snitch in front of me and the wind in my hair / I'm getting closer, the crowd screams / But then there's a bludger and my spirit dies."
Muggles want to play Quidditch too
This Quidditch experience - the ecstasy of flight, the sudden pain - is not very different from the experiences that Harry Potter, the magician's student, has when he learns and practices the sport at Hogwarts boarding school.
In the novels of the author JK Rowling, Quidditch plays such an important role that essential parts of the respective plot are at least prepared and be justified.
All of this turned out to be so suggestive that non-magic readers, the so-called Muggles, also wanted to be part of it.
They formed teams and leagues and somehow adapted the rules for the mundane world.
The flying broom became a rather cumbersome pole clamped between the legs, and the "snitch", which at some point mysteriously appeared, was represented by a player who clamps a sock filled with a tennis ball into his waistband and runs across the field - whoever tears it off gets it extra points.
But in the Muggle world, Quidditch is now called Quadball, according to the German Quidditch Federation, which may soon no longer bear that name - they want to distance themselves from Rowling, who has been accused of "transphobic" statements.
The inventor of the game will get over it.
And maybe, with all due respect, the Quidditch of our imaginations is a little more exciting than the Muggle version adapted from reality.