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Any day Manny Pacquiao fights is a day of national obligation.

On days like last Sunday, we dutifully get up early, put on our most casual clothes, shadow box a little and report to our preferred public arena, restaurant or cinema to view the fight live. Life stops for a while. The crime rate always drops to zero. Traffic stops.

There are no penalties for not watching Manny fight — only a subtle form of ostracism in the aftermath, when all conversation revolves around what happened. Those who did not participate in the unsanctioned national ritual are viewed as lesser Filipinos.

In the restaurant which is my usual combat posting during Pacquiao fights, the place is always packed ten times capacity. For P600, I get what is effectively half a seat before a grainy big screen in an oxygen-starved room. The ticket comes with what passes off as breakfast: a cold compilation of soggy fried rice, dried meat, a limp omelet and pickled papaya. Oh yes, also a plastic cup with tepid water just warm enough to dilute a pack of instant coffee.

But that is not what one pays for really. Unhealthy as it might be, one actually pays for the atmosphere. Not atmosphere in its usual scientific meaning, because the air there is mainly hand-me-down. Perhaps ambience is more precise.

This is a moment for essential tribal bonding. All unessential identities are stripped off and we are, for that moment, all equal warriors for the nation — or so we imagine. At no other time do I hear the national anthem sung with such fervor as before a Pacquiao fight.

When a panning television camera caught Filipinos in Las Vegas carelessly displaying the flag with the red field up, the crowd I was with cheered lustily. The nation was at war, even if the Pacman was our sole warrior. We were co-warriors only in spirit. Had things gone awfully wrong, he would be the only casualty and all we were expected to do was drink up our beer and mourn.

In my usual combat posting, I jostle with justices in shorts. Only during such instances can I blow smoke into their nostrils without being cited in contempt.

I run into faces from the past, people who had tried to sell me insurance or who had lived with me in the political underground decades ago. We briefly compare hairlines and proceed with our duties for the day: empathizing with the man who has become the principal icon for the community we are, imagining his fight to be ours too, and usurping his glory as a common possession.

I did not know that even the most jaded corporate lawyers, those who will figuratively cut throats for a fee, could sing the Pacman’s signature hymn by heart. They did so with tears swelling up in their wolverine eyes. That impressed me.

When Pacquiao took down Ricky Hatton for the third and final time in only the second round, I thought my eardrums would be permanently damaged. I thought the roof would blow off. The lawyers and the doctors, the salesmen and the ex-cadres were all on their feet, collectively chanting the new pledge of national allegiance: Mahneee! Mahneee! Mahneee!

Beer bottles rolled off tables and crashed unnoticed. Filipinos in Las Vegas and in Quezon City were joined, by the magic of modern communications, in simultaneous rhythmic frenzy. This was an ancient tribal war dance, no doubt, reincarnated in this digital age.

There so much human energy unleashed in a second right after Pacquiao’s left hook caught Hatton’s jaw, I thought the Marikina Fault might give. I feared the older patriots in the crowd might expire there and then. I half-anticipated the earth would roll and the sun dim.

Then, just as suddenly, the crowd calmed down. The burst of cheering dwindled into excited chatter. In another second, there was just cold post-mortems. In another minute, there was just mock whining about how expensive the tickets were and how short the main feature turned out to be.

Soon enough, people were quietly streaming out of the place, pulling out their grocery lists from their beer-soaked shorts or fretting about how much laundry there was to be done. Having performed our patriotic duties for the day, it was time to attend to the other rituals of daily life.

Sports, it has been said, has displaced war as the civilized means for expending pent up tribal energies — although two Latin American nations once sent armored units to their common border after a disputed football match. In Europe, hordes of fans effectively become invading armies, following their teams across borders to brawl in foreign lands.

Sports, in a borderless global economy, have also become the alternative forum for consolidating national sympathies.

When I entered University a few decades back, constructing nationalism was the intellectual fashion of the age. We thought that could be achieved by abolishing Spanish courses and enforcing a national language. We thought that could be achieved by demonizing “US imperialism” and imagining that a rapacious world out there was conspiring to make us miserable.

We thought we could make out people patriotic by making them fearful of alien influences. We imagined some pristine national soul that must be protected by policies of autarky and self-reliance. How futile and ultimately destructive that paradigm was.

The Pacquiao phenomenon now delivers what the anti-colonial intelligentsia so miserably failed to do: an icon that reassures us we are not inferior to others. An icon that tells us we could all triumph by pure grit alone, broken English and all.