Sports Is Cancelled...Now What?

It’s no secret that I’m a big sports fan, and it was about to be (arguably) the most wonderful time of the year for us fanatics. Hockey and basketball were about to enter the home stretch of the regular season and race into the playoffs, baseball spring training was wrapping up and going into the regular season, Formula One was starting up, the football offseason was just beginning with a slew of signings and trades and the famed NCAA March Madness tournament was also just around the corner. Not to mention Humber College was set to host the Canadian college championship for men’s basketball, which I was going to call games for. However, with the spread of COVID-19, all this is now out the window.

We all knew COVID-19 was quickly spreading from China, into Europe and now into North America, but no one really knew how bad it was. The bombshell dropped on Wednesday night that NBA centre Rudy Gobert had contracted the virus just 2 days after making fun of the public fear by proceeding to touch every piece of equipment in his vicinity. The NBA wasted no time immediately suspending the season indefinitely that night, and the next day consisted of every other league announcing that they were either cancelling their season entirely or just pushing their games back. Now this leaves me in a difficult spot…what do I talk about now?

Well, the talking heads on sports talk shows don’t even know how to answer that question on their own shows. Shows have struggled coming up with different talking points with regards to the difficult situation we all find ourselves in. The worst part is that since we are being encouraged to self-isolate, we can’t even go to the gym to play sports to make up for the lack of professional sports coming into our lives. I guess that leaves us with video games, board games or even…reading! But hey, there’s sports video games and sports books out there, so I guess it’s not so bad.

It’s in times like these that we have to remember the things that are truly important (our family and friends), and keep them as close to us as possible. It’s especially important to keep the extremely young and the elderly safe as they are the most vulnerable. What I’m trying to say is that, sure sports are missing (which sucks), but there’s more important things to worry about right now. We need to keep self-isolating as much as possible, keep washing our hands and if we do a good enough job, everything (including sports) will be back to normal within a couple months. Or it could be the worst case scenario where things stay shut down until the end of summer. Either way keep your loved ones close and stay inside.