Bill Murray had a potential crisis.

He was scheduled to accept the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at a Kennedy Center ceremony in late October. Old friends such as David Letterman and "Ghostbusters" director Ivan Reitman would be there. As much as Murray likes to shrug off celebrity and its gold-plated handmaiden, awards, this one meant something to him.

But Murray's beloved Cubs would potentially be in their most important game in decades that same night, Game 7 of the National League Championship Series, the gateway to the long-elusive World Series appearance.

And we all asked a question that seems to be asked with regularity these days, and in a surprising variety of situations: What would Bill Murray do?

It's a question that gets asked because the man has forced us to a certain truth: If you also had money, fame, time, wide-ranging interests, friends around the globe, and the curiosity and chutzpah required to make the most of those possessions, you, too, would be Bill Murray. I know I would.

But maybe I would not choose to be Bill Murray as that particular day approached.

Turns out, he was prepared to be a responsible adult and show up, he told The Washington Post, but not without regret. "Ugh," he said. "I'd much rather be sitting there in a good box seat at Wrigley Field."

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He ended up not having to make that choice because the Cubs won the series in six games, defeating the Los Angeles Dodgers the night before.

That is how things have worked out lately for the Bill Murray who lives off-screen, a 66-year-old intermittently employed actor who is killing it at life. In recent years, when he isn't turning in another Oscar-worthy performance as a sad-but-hopeful character, he has become America's beloved uncle, showing up in somewhat random places while brightening the mood and furthering the legend of Bill Murray. Along the way, he gives us a role model for taking an active part in life, for not just accepting the routine.

There Bill Murray is, busting into a White House press briefing to shill for the Cubs. There he is, jumping behind a bar at South by Southwest or at a son's Brooklyn restaurant to serve drinks, or crashing a kickball game in New York City, or putting with President Barack Obama amid a public service announcement about national health insurance.

And, look, there's Bill Murray at a Baylor vs. Xavier basketball game, leading a surprise happy birthday singalong to a 94-year-old widow, the mother of Baylor's team chaplain. Murray was in Texas for the game because another son, Luke, is a Xavier assistant coach, and why wouldn't you go to your son's basketball games well into his adulthood, if you could swing it?

OK, sure, you say, sports and entertainment. But what about hip-hop? Well, there's Bill Murray backstage just last week at a Lupe Fiasco concert in Austin, Texas, talking the Chicago hip-hop star into coming out for an encore.

Add in the golf tournaments — leading an "America" chant at the Ryder Cup — and all those Cubs World Series games, and you have Murray constantly populating the celebrity columns, but in the good way, not the Kardashian way.

It's like all of America has become a late-night talk show, and Murray is its favorite unbilled guest. This is an expansion of the role he typically plays on actual talk shows, where he comes on, does something low-key, off-kilter and hilarious and is the best thing that show has seen in months.

He famously doesn't have an agent or a publicist, just an 800 number, because that is clearly the admirable, if somewhat inefficient, way to field offers for work. Make a good pitch to him, and he'll appear in your indie movie, as untested director Ted Melfi did for what would become the well-received "St. Vincent."

Are there complications to Murray that challenge his suitability for sainthood, secular or otherwise? Of course. In a contentious 2008 divorce from Jennifer Butler, his wife of a decade, she accused him of alcohol, pot and sex addiction, disappearing on the family and being abusive to her on multiple occasions; when the couple settled the divorce, she withdrew the allegations.

There are people who will not forgive him for the alleged abuse, just as there are people who view accusations made in the heat of marital dissolution with skepticism. It is probably meaningful that the second-worst public accusation you can find about Murray, before or since the divorce, is that he was an absolute ass on the set of 1993's "Groundhog Day," severing his friendship with director Harold Ramis. (It also was his best on-screen performance to that date, a demonstration of the depth he was capable of and has shown since.)

And certainly since the divorce he seems to have thrown himself open-throttle into the public persona, the jovial man about town treating the whole country as his town. It could be read as an extended Bill Murray performance piece, but I really think it is somebody trying to take the most enjoyment out of the situation he is in — and to share some of that enjoyment with others.

"To Bill, life is a party, the world is an improv stage and we are all in his show," the comic Jimmy Kimmel said during the Mark Twain prize event.