I've been debating about whether to ask this question or not, and I finally decided that I had nothing to lose.

I have a decent working knowledge of what, physically, a network is. What I am having trouble with is finding an analogy that would make it easier to understand just how far networking goes.

The only idea that I had was that of a similar analogy about electricity (electricity = water).
Where the actual network is like a waterway, and unsecured ports (etc) would be things like faucets.

Does that work, or in other words, would that be a good assessment of how a network actually functions?