What has a New York giraffe got to do with us a day’s drive north? Nothing at all, and everything.

For weeks, the pregnant April’s antics and moods captivated online viewers around the globe as zookeepers anticipated the drop of her six-foot calf. Whenever the live feed went dark, the zoo heard about it. News outlets carried updates, and online comments came from Lincoln County and elsewhere in Maine.

It was a diversion from politics; educational about a majestic species and how man attempts to meet its needs in captivity; and unifying, in international proportions.

That’s where we come in, from Wiscasset or wherever we watched on our tablets, phones, or desktops. If you were watching a little or a lot, you were part of a temporary, global community. They form only on occasion and do us all good. Usually, it’s after something bad happens.

We’ve seen it following major terrorism incidents when other nations offered moral or other support to the one that was struck; natural disasters; and now we’ve seen it with a giraffe with a boyfriend named Oliver and attendants who took her maternal strikes and near strikes in stride, still kissing her belly when she would let them.

How human, how caring, of them and of us, for being glad that if she had to be in from the wild, she at least knew kindness and protection from the poaching that continues to downsize species in her native habitat; and she and the live feed have shown us that, while the rest of the fast-moving world rightly demands our attention, some things, like the birth of a six-foot New Yorker everyone was rooting for, happen in their own time.