Finally came to that permanent place in the always hyper pregame coverage where someone asks which TV commercials you'll be talking about at the water cooler Monday morning.
None, probably.
Unless you've installed a water cooler in your house during the pandemic.
Been wondering all week what the Super Bowl is going to look and feel like after a year when a considerable portion of the audience has withstood abject misery, loneliness, depression, violence, and a deadly mutating pathogen that rages onward.
So Chiefs vs. Buccaneers is supposed to matter? OK, enjoy those Doritos ads. But come to think of it, did it matter that while America's death toll from COVID-19 soared into first place in the world that the Lakers and the Dodgers made Los Angeles the city of champions? And what, the Lightning won the Stanley Cup? Yeah, pretty sure that happened.
If Duquesne's basketballers drop one on the road to St. Bonnie's and nobody's there to see it, did it happen? Penn State didn't play a football game until late October, lost its first five games, won the next four, and opted out of a bowl game. Are we in some diseased place where 4-5 teams have the option to opt out of a bowl game? That didn't happen, did it?
Intergalactic superstar and sports oracle LeBron James said this week he has zero excitement for the NBA All-Star Game, which, though a very common malady, has more to do with going to Atlanta, where there are so few mandated coronavirus restrictions that the Hawks actually allow fans for their home games.
On Super Bowl Sunday, the most anticipated date on the American sports calendar, some might wonder what sport means in the backdrop of such heartache, not merely for the history of sport, but for the history of us.
No one I know thinks harder about sport's place in the broader culture than Pitt historian Rod Ruck.
"It feels like an existential moment for sport, just as it is for the country," he wrote in an email the other day. "Protests and coordinated action the likes of which we've not seen from athletes since the '60s have made sport a force for social justice again. And the pandemic, with college kids playing despite the public health consequences, and the possibility of them paying a physical price down the road, has exposed collegiate sport's contradictions. The NCAA wants to hold its tournament because of financial pressures even when it knows it should have postponed play until the worst of the pandemic is over. Meanwhile, pro sport seems to have weathered the pandemic's financial hit but not collegiate and scholastic sport. Even before the pandemic, kids from poor families were engaged in sport less than half as much as kids from affluent households. That disparity is likely much worse now."
When 6:30 arrives, sport will provide its essential escapism, with purists noting that a Super Bowl that juxtaposes quarterback savants such as Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes is as legitimate as they come.
Happily enough, much the same thing happened in the other major sports over the past year. All produced a fully authentic champion free of even the discussion of asterisks, unless the asterisk is meant to denote additional nobility.
"A lot of people say that there's a star next to this championship," Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo noted during the NBA playoffs. "I feel like, at the end of the day, this is going to be the toughest championship you could ever win."
That might be true, but only the players can know it. What the fans know is only that their role in these games has been written out by the pandemic, and that has left a very different game.
The dynamics are largely absent. Established momentum is not sustained. Potential momentum is not realized. The pressure in any particular situation, intangible as you may imagine it, is wildly different in an empty or mostly empty place. You don't have to wonder why the Penguins were 0 for 19 on the power play recently when you understand there's no one in their building to yell "shoot the puck!" or to boo the bejeezus out of them when they don't.
So the purists note that, as well. Sports have done an admirable job imitating themselves, but they are hollowed out both literally and metaphorically. Baseball is trying to shorten its season again. Hockey has some 40 players on about 12 teams in COVID-19 protocols. College basketball is an unending drama of COVID-19 roulette and is putting its unpaid front-line workers (the athletes) through heightened disease exposure to ensure their TV money. Budweiser has sidelined its Super Bowl Clydesdales to put its advertising budget behind vaccine distribution.
Sports, like life, is a mess.
"Still, sport offers us a sense of continuity, something to hold on to during one of these most difficult years in the nation's history," Ruck said. "For me, and I think quite a few other people, it still provides moments of transcendence and the chance to think about something that has brought so much joy to our lives."
Perhaps we'll take that under advisement for the evening and enjoy Chiefs-Bucs as we can, and look forward to a time when sport and life are restored to its full authenticity.
Also: If Brady wins, I'm going to vomit.
