The photos of grown men crying are everywhere this week. Men with their faces buried in their elbows, men shaking their heads and choking back tears.

The death of former LA Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant — along with his little girl and a host of other people in a helicopter crash — shook the world of sports on Sunday. It's a world known for placing a wall between itself and emotions.

As the Tom Hanks character says, “There's no crying in baseball.” Nor does it seem there's crying in any other sport.

Sports figures are expected to be macho. Manly. Self-reliant and stout-hearted.

You celebrate wins.

You suffer defeat “like a man.”

Softness of any kind isn't just discouraged. It can and often does cause outright disdain on behalf of the fans. Go ahead and Google “player takes time off for child's birth,” and read the comments' section if you dare. They're chock full of words we can't print in a family newspaper.

But Sunday, that wall came down.

We saw men, grown men, macho, manly, stout-hearted men for who they are: Human beings who grieve the loss of a friend as anyone would.

They felt. They cried unabashedly and unashamedly in front of a nation.

And in doing so, they sent the rest of us a powerful lesson about what it means to be human.