Enjoy this hold-yourbreath season while it lasts

Four weeks into this holdyour-breath season it is clear that the NFL still offers the best product in sports and that the league, like so many 2020 operations, is in a really fragile state.

Enjoy football (and fantasy football) while it lasts. Savor the joy and torture that are the Sunday afternoon and Monday night distractions we crave now more than ever. Appreciate every weekend, every game, every highlight.

Because if we haven’t reached a point where we consider it inevitable for the season to (at least partially) disintegrate under the weight of COVID-19 complications, the prospects of it holding up in recognizable form for another 13 weeks (plus a month of playoffs) are iffy at best.

We just don’t know how long this ride is going to last.

We are a quarter of the way through a 16-game schedule that is woven into a pandemic world with very loose threads. There’s no fool-proof method for being able to guarantee anything beyond the moment, no matter how much money and how many resources the NFL dedicates to mitigating the spread of COVID.

We were reminded of that in recent days. Two Week 4 games scheduled for Sunday were postponed, with Titans-Steelers moved to Oct. 25 and Patriots-Chiefs pushed back just a day to Monday night.

These developments were not a disaster. They didn’t derail a season. Hopefully they aren’t a harbinger, either, because scheduling could become an unmanageable nightmare if multiple teams run into issues.

It won’t take much more slippage for the NFL to lose some (perhaps all) of its competitive integrity — or its already shaky handle on player safety. The Chiefs are already in the position of having to play three games in 11 days. With each passing week it becomes more difficult and more irresponsible to cram together slates that would represent a full body of work for every team.