Folks, it’s a Saturday night at 8:08pm as I write this and something just doesn’t feel right. This is the kinda night that I, and many others, took for granted in so many years past. A hot summer day has cooled into a warm summer night. The golden hour looks absolutely magnificent as I sit here and type away while longing to turn back time or have the ability to turn time forward to the better days that inevitably lay ahead.
It seems cautiously safe to say that those better days could be just around the corner with the return of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and (hopefully) the NBA Playoffs at the end of July. I really wish that Major League Baseball could not be a complete and total embarrassment for once and get their shit together so that we can have ball games back on Saturday nights just like these. It also surely seems like NFL and NCAA Football will also be back this fall.
Regardless of what leagues do or don’t do over the course of the next couple of months, it doesn’t help me now. This summer was supposed to be a dream. I had plans to see a Grateful Dead concert outside in the glow of a summer evening, go to the Faster Horses Music Festival that has now been canceled, and spend countless Saturday nights just like these drinking beer and watching sports with the boys. My annual Fourth of July trip to Nashville (the best city in America to celebrate Fourth of July in) has also been canceled.
There’s an old saying that says something like, “if you wanna make God laugh then tell him your plans” and hopefully I gave the man upstairs a good chuckle by telling him mine. I went from working in a field I truly loved to being out of a job and virtually the entire field being in a hiring freeze. I went from living in a place I loved to moving back home due to this entire situation. Since I got home roughly three months ago, I’ve only filled my gas tank up twice. I’ve barely gone anywhere up until recently. The reality is that even if I could do some of the many things that I used to take for granted right here and right now, I really wouldn’t have anyone to do those things with anyway since all of my closest friends are now states away.
I’m smart enough to know that there are many people who have situations that are way worse off than mine. Many people have lost loved ones due to the coronavirus. Many people have lost the roof over their head due to losing their incomes. There are countless people who would easily trade places with me right now and I get that. There are also countless people who are right there with me in the sense that they’re completely worn out with what this year has become and done to them and they just wanna watch the Yankees vs. Red Sox game that was scheduled for tonight.
It’s been over three months since a (major) professional sporting event was played on American soil when the lowly Los Angeles Kings beat Canada’s least favorite hockey team** in the Ottawa Senators by a score of 3-2. In that three months so much has happened. I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said that the bad hasn’t outweighed the good. This is undoubtedly a season in everyone’s life that is mired in grief and sadness that we all want to be over.
I think life will start to feel a bit more normal again once we can all come home and turn on a sporting event. Life will suck a little bit less if we can just have a few hours per day where we can kick back and watch sports.
I hope that a year from right now we can all have the summer of our dreams. I hope that coronavirus and systemic racism are launched into the sun. I hope concerts and music festivals are at 150% capacity. I hope that there are beers to be drank, long summer nights to be had, and a sporting event on every night for you to watch if you’re having a night like I am tonight.
**366 Sports Foreign Correspondent Trevor Knapp informed me that Canada’s least favorite hockey team is actually the Vancouver Canucks but the city of Ottawa is a giant shit hole****
****Our other Canadian writer, Ryan Moore, has informed me that the Montreal Canadiens are Canada’s least favorite hockey team. This makes sense since most of their fans are absolutely insufferable.