There's no handbook or playbook for this. There's no map or lantern to guide us through this ghost town.
After 9/11, sports were there to pick us up. Sports were there when President Kennedy was assassinated. There was even a World Series when most of our young men were in Europe and the Pacific during World War II.
Sports can survive storms and wars, but have been forced to jump back in unprecedented lengths from this coronavirus.
Right now, the sports world reads like an obituary, or a mortuary of canceled games and lost seasons. Even March Madness, our singular stamp on the sports map has been erased by the growing shadow of this pandemic. No NCAA Tournament. No NBA. No NHL. The Masters has been kicked down the calendar. Even baseball's opening day has been pushed back by two weeks. Maybe it will turn into two months.
That's the problem. We can live with temporary rules and boundaries, but the unknown is what has us so lost. How can the answer to everything be to wash our hands? How can our lives be reduced to soap and water, or to masks and gloves?
We have schedules, deadlines and ambitions. We have sports to watch, games to enjoy, money to gamble. If there's been any constant in our lives, it's been sports. Now the dribble of the basketball, slap of the puck, and crack of the bat has been replaced by the squishy sound of sanitizer.
Almost everything we adore about sports - the bonding, cheering, and booing, the high-fiving and chest-bumping - have been ripped from us. Those uniquely sports things that act as a balm or band-aid on our communities, have been stolen from us. How do we adjust to the murky world of social distancing when our impulse is socializing? Drive down an open road and you'll see two cars close together. Hop on a bus and you'll see swaths of empty seats next to clusters of people. Walk into a tavern and find strangers congregating over a game being broadcast over the bar.
We, in particular, are used to the mayhem, to the sardine-can life of the Big Apple. The crowds and voices are hardwired into us, part of the monstrous montage we walk through every day. While slack-jawed tourists marvel at the size and noise of our world, we don't even notice it. We love people and choose to be a part of the masses.
A friend refused to shake my hand this week. Not out of malice, but out of caution. I can't call my pops and chat about the Yankees. We can't scribble teams onto brackets. We can't make plans with our pals to watch or attend a game. Instead of Keith Hernandez we have Wolf Blitzer. Instead of Reggie Miller we have Bill Hemmer. Sports are an escape from the dungeons of politics and elections, and from self-righteous sermons. The silenced sports world has jarred our big-city sensibilities.
Yet even in the quiet chaos of a pandemic, we know life will get better, that sports will return. We've just become so accustomed to having them beamed into our living rooms that there's a sense of withdrawal when they're wrenched from us so abruptly. Soon enough, we should be back to wondering if Giancarlo Stanton belongs on the Yankees, if Pete Alonso will club another 40 or 50 homers, and if the Jets can make good draft picks.
So stop buying toilet paper. Rent a sports flick. Hit the gym. Smile. Sports can survive storms and wars, so they can survive the flu on steroids. So can we.
Follow Jason on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
