“Everybody is a fantasy football player now. Women, children, old people, everybody. I don’t think there’s any limits on who can play. My wife is playing this year for the first time.” – Eric Karabell, senior writer for ESPN.

A research study by Harris Interactive recently showed there are 29.6 million fantasy sports players.

These days everyone plays and it gets pretty intense. Family rivalry and bragging rights are always at stake, and some leagues have money on the line. In serious leagues, players have even agreed to get tattoos for being the last place team.

 It used to be that fantasy owners had to wait until the paper the next day to figure out how well their players did, but now websites do it for them in real time.

This country has started to go a little overboard with fantasy sports though. Articles on fantasy sports are on every major sports website months in advance of the season. There are fantasy baseball previews in January for a season that begins in April.

It’s not just fantasy sports now; there is fantasy everything. You can play fantasy Congress, in which you get points for passed legislation. Or fantasy poker, even though people can play poker themselves. The list goes on and on.

Why stop there, though? How about fantasy cooking, fantasy police, or even fantasy workplace?

You could set up a point system where people get points for doing good things for their job. You get a point for making deadline, and a bonus point if the boss says “good work,” minus 1 for taking extra time on your break or around the water cooler. Everyone would pick people in their office and add up the points.

Maybe this would have helped Allen Iverson try at practice.

This would boost office productivity and let people do what they love. Think about a guy working and his colleagues all standing around yelling at him like a sporting event: “Come on John, you can do it. Only one more page.” Or from the other side “Why would you staple that there; that’s the worst staple job I’ve ever seen.”

This “fantasy” might not be far off, and we can either ignore it or jump in. It begs the question when does fantasy become reality?