Sports has been a significant part of my life - some would say too significant. Hell, this blog, which over the years has become less and less sports related, would never have started without it. The rhythms of how we view the year is often around what sports or events are happening when. We all know the darkest part of the sports calendar is the month or so following the Super Bowl before March Madness picks up. You have NBA and NHL playing out the string of the regular season, MLB teasing us with meaingless spring training. March Madness is the light at the end of that tunnel, one that really blows open as March Madness ends and the NBA & NHL playoffs begin. Well, in 2020 Covid extended that tunnel a whole lot further.
It's funny to remember back in March how the immediate questions were around how long this would last, with wildly differing opinions from 'ah, it'll be a few weeks' to 'it's not coming back, let's just focus on 2021'. In the end, we went the bubble route, and a year later we have mostly still empty arenas. But the hyper intensity of what would happen dominated that period.
So did the silence. The lack of sports. I remember a great ESPN commercial that came out probably in April or so with the tag-line 'We miss sports too' or something like that. It was poignant, it was beautiful, and it was so raw. Yes, losing sports is a bit trivial to what horrors much of the country was encountering at the time, but as something that is so often people's escape or outlet, that was complete shut off.
It also seemed so distant on how it would return. While the world was learning the term social distancing, it was a bit of a mystery of how something that required you to not social distance would return. In time we would learn the actual chances of spread are extremely tied to the time spend in close contact, so these short period of time of contact wasn't actually that much or a risk, but no one knew at the time. How also could we stage this when tests were so difficult to get. In the end, bubbles would solve this issue - but raised a whole new set of questions, mainly around how much is a crowd a driving factor in enjoying sports.
Sports is so intertwined with emotions, and the emotions of a crowd undoubtedly adds to that expreience. We were robbed of that. We knew ahead of time and had time to combat or deal with the view that we would be watching games in empty stadiums. The leagues tried their best to pump in fake crowd noise, change the way games are shot, get creative, do a lot to paper over the fact that there were no fans.
It wasn't the same though. We lived with it because there were no alternatives. And I'll admit at times the NBA and NHL did fine. But whether it was empty stands for big baseball games, or incredible football moments met with no reaction, it was just not the same. That said, it did lay the groundwork for how incredible fans returning, even at restricted capacity, can be.
There were only about 6,000 fans in Bills stadium when they got a 100-yd pick six in the playoffs. That fanbase finally had a good year just as no one could watch them in person, They finally got a home playoff game, a big one, and had a legendary play. The noise, the fans, everythikng was so pure, so beautiful, such a reminder of what lies ahead and what we had to live through.
I do like in the end every sport, every event, was impacted. We thought at the time maybe football got lucky again, and while they did allow some fans they had to deal with the same issues. Global events had the same challenges - with Wimbledon being canclled, the French Open played in October and so much else. Nothing was spared in 2020 and 2021.
As we reach the one year mark, if anthing the value of sports has become more pointed. It was an emptiness in April-June 2020, the busiest time of the sports year being whittled down to a remote NFL draft as the highlight. Its rebirth in the summer, in isolated bubbles splayed across North America was a shining light of happiness, if only how it forced us all to 'accept' change. Its eminent return in a more positive way stands before us now - with the filling of brackets as a redemptive return after that being the first major event to get the ax a year ago.
Sports like everything else changed in the past year, but not its place and improtance in my life and the lives of so many people globally. The specter of international competition, be it the Olympics or the Euros, looms large but even if those are scuttled, we have our US sports running at full stream, if not full crowds, here again, and that is all I can ask for in 2021.
