No NCAA tournaments or spring sports, no NBA or NHL playoffs, no baseball season, no Masters golf, etc., etc. 2020, a year unlike any other.
Obviously what's most important is staying safe and healthy, and working together to best contain the burden to be placed on our fellow citizens.
We're looking at weeks stuck inside. So how do fans like you and I bear the silence?
Sports is still out there, if you know where to look.
I watch games on YouTube from the late 1970s and early 1980s quite often, but I do so with a certain purpose: I like how they sound. In the voices of Bob Cole, Danny Gallivan, Dick Enberg and Pat Summerall, I hear my childhood. I'll often turn on a game from that era late at night before bed, then listen and watch about 15 minutes of it before retiring. I never turn on a 1990s game -- probably not because one is better than the other, but because one is more comfortable to me.
When you have that impulse to watch sports after your work day, there are hundreds if not thousands of free options here.
I'm not knowledgable about e-sports, but I know it to be a rapidly growing entity that very well may come to dominate sports watching. Looking back on old games is fine and good, but if somehow there were e-sports tournaments to replicate the NHL and NBA playoffs, knowing how good the games look would lead to me checking them out, if not diving all the way in.
At my house, we found a video game that works for the parents and the children: Cars 3. We've had a lot of fun these last few nights racing against each other.
Is that sports? Count it!
Maybe a family hike isn't technically a "sport", but getting outside together is good, and it also has been therapeutic. In four days home together so far, we've been playing baseball in the yard, and the kids have been riding bicycles, skateboards and on roller blades. There's a lot you can do outside, and the weather of course is gradually improving.
I'm a big fantasy-sports player, and the dearth of live games has put a major wrench into how I normally spend my free time. But there's been one exception to that for me: Strat-O-Matic Baseball. I'm in four leagues with friends all over the country. You're playing a simulation -- essentially a board game, although it can be played on the computer as we do it -- and so you don't need live action to determine your outcomes. We play off last year's cards, and we drafted Saturday (AL only) and Sunday (NL only). Not getting together in New York and Philadelphia for these drafts was definitely missed, but the drafts went along online just the same. Now, we play our seasons.
If this interests you try Twitter or do a Google search to find or create a Strat league of your own.
It'll take as long as it takes. This is an unusual time for so many reasons, and the lack of spectator sports is certainly one of them. One thing this will do is lead to much introspection about how we spend our free time. Who knows if we don't come out the other end with a collectively different attitude toward sports? Maybe we'll realize we don't need them as much as we thought. Or, perhaps, vice versa.
Be well.