Noah Sanchez, Sports Editor
This time of year was special for sports fans. Basketball and hockey are just about ready to enter their playoff stretch, baseball has just begun and hopes of your favorite team winning their division are still so young and full of excitement.
The NFL is getting ramped up to undergo its annual draft which sees the lives of many young college athletes change forever, as their dreams of making it to the pros become reality in front of spectators watching from home.
The days are longer, the nights are warmer and summer is just around the corner. April every year is the beginning of what is a sports fan paradise. That was until the spread of COVID-19 hit the sports world like a truck, halting any plans of a normal spring sports season.
So now what? What do we do now that sports have been ripped away from us before we could fully wrap our arms around it?
It feels like an eternity ago since we heard the unimaginable news that the NBA would be suspending its season on March 11. It was at that point that reality set in for a lot of sports fans around the country.
The suspension of the NBA set a domino effect in motion the likes of which the sports world has never seen before. The NHL also suspended it’s season less than a day later. The NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments that had been played every year in March since 1982 were canceled. The start of the Major League Baseball season originally slated to begin on March 26 was postponed indefinitely. And that is just the beginning.
Major sporting events, like The Masters and The British Open, UFC events, The Kentucky Derby, are all either canceled or postponed.
There have even been talks if the NFL season, which is scheduled to begin its training camp for teams in late July and early August, will have to be modified or postponed in some fashion.
So again I ask, now what? How do we pass the time that was so easily filled with the games we all loved? The simple answer is… We don’t. There is no way to fill the void that a canceled sports world has left us with.
There is no way to look at this time without our beloved athletes who we build up as superhuman and not miss them.
We’ve grown accustomed to inviting sports into our homes and falling into the great distraction that it provides. A distraction that allows us for a few moments to forget about that heated argument you got into with your loved one, or that test you didn’t pass and all those real-world problems that you go to sports to get away from.
Right now all we can do is wait, stay safe and be smart until our great escape returns.
In the grand scheme of the world we are in right now, sports is the least of the concern. There are more pressing issues at hand and of course, those should be handled with our utmost care.
But in terms of the sports bubble that most of us enjoy spending the majority of our time in, we sure are missing a walk-off home run right now. A first-round knockout. A hole in one. A buzzer-beating shot to win the game. All the things that made us fall in love with sports in the first place are dearly missed and that’s OK.
The world will get back to normal eventually, and when it does the sports that brought us together once will do it again. Until then be safe, be smart, be well.
See you soon.
