There are no sports. Now what?

Habitual ESPN.com visitors are no doubt aware that, at the very top of the page, there is a banner or chyron (or whatever you want to call it) that lists out the day’s top games/events and their results.

It’s the HTML5 version of the SportsCenter bottom-of-screen scroll, your assurance that you’re on the command deck, that all of your pressing sports info needs can be fulfilled here and here alone.

On Tuesday morning this header was completely blank: 1.5 inches of light-gray nothingness, representing a yawning chasm at the heart of the entertainment-industrial complex.

I’m a habitual ESPN.com visitor myself. There may be other, more niche, sites whose content hits more of my sweet spots, but when it comes to box scores and quick hits I almost always circle back around to the “Worldwide Leader.” It’s almost reflexive at this point. A lot of times I’ll open a new chrome tab with a clear intent to navigate to some other corner of the web only to blink and find myself reading some NFL story I’m only vaguely interested in, like, “Which AFC South team has made the best offseason moves” (Spoiler alert: It’s not the Houston Texans).

During the past week’s parade of coronavirus closures and cancellations I’ve watched ESPN’s scoreboard go from leading with the big-ticket NBA and English Premier League results, to listing a whole bunch of NCAA basketball games as postponed, to caring an awful lot about a fanless UFC Fight Night, to, on Monday, listing out a single, lonely result for a Russian Premier League match (for the curious: FC Tambov topped PFC Krylia Sovetov Samara 3-0 on goals by Georgi Melkadze, Anton Kilin and Vladimir Obukhov), before getting to Tuesday’s early-morning tabula rasa.

By early afternoon the header was updated. It was still entirely gray but only mostly blank. Whoever’s in charge of that sliver of the site had thrown in a link to a long list of events that either wouldn’t be happening ever or wouldn’t be happening for a long time thanks to

COVID-19.

That’s a useful link, but I kind of wish they had found somewhere else to stick it. Leaving the dead zone would’ve been more appropriate — a tidy reminder that things aren’t normal right now, and they might not be for … well, experts disagree on how long.

Superficially, it seems kind of silly to worry about sports at a time when the major questions of the day range from literal life and death (so far COVID-19 has claimed around 8,000 lives worldwide and over 100 in the United

States) to incipient economic collapse (the Dow has sloughed off about 8,000 to 9,000 points over the last month and social distancing measures pose an serious threat to several service industries), but their absence really drives home the upside-down of it all.

As frivolous as sports can seem, as frivolous as they frankly are, they still serve an important societal role. Sports are community-building, something for people to rally around, small-talk fodder for folks without much else in common — giving them a sense of shared identity that isn’t rooted in anything inherently toxic.

(Not that there can’t be elements of toxicity in sports fandom. I’m looking at you soccer hooligans. Y’all need to stop with that. I read one story about Russian soccer hooligans meeting surreptitiously in random forests with prearranged numbers just to whale on one another. Why not just join an MMA gym at that point?)

No sports has historically meant that things are pretty dire. Since the widespread codification of athletics in the western world in the late 19th century the only major interruptions to the sporting life have been capital-C Calamities. Just look at the summer Olympics, held quadrennially since 1896 with three major exceptions 1916, 1940 and 1944. Whatever kept them from hold the Games in those years? Wars. Big ones.

2020 is, of course, an Olympic year. The Games of the XXXII Olympiad are set to take place in Tokyo, Japan, starting on July 24 and running through Aug. 9. On Tuesday the International Olympic Committee released a “communique” insisting that, “The IOC remains fully committed to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, and with more than four months to go before the Games there is no need for any drastic decisions at this stage; and any speculation at this moment would be counter-productive,” and their stance may prove to be the right one.

Though armchair theorists and actual experts alike have hazarded guesses that this current public health crisis could extend well into the summer months (or even beyond), there are others that are much more sanguine in their expectations and consensus has been slow to form.

But while the Olympics have a (distant, as in: precious few living can remember) history of being scuttled by malign world events — and while World War I and II also, obviously, knocked the European soccer scene flat for a while — American domestic sports have never seen anything bordering on the present level of disruption.

The American and National Leagues did have their baseball season forcibly shortened by the government in 1918 when the United States finally got around to pitching in on the Great War (as it was then called), but teams only lost around 25 games on average, and they still held the World Series in September, with the Boston Red Sox beating the Chicago Cubs in six games.

The famous “Spanish flu” pandemic of that year — the deadliest disease outbreak on record, with a death toll in the tens of millions, against which COVID-19 has been frequently juxtaposed — didn’t materially impact scheduling, though several minor leaguers and cup of coffee players (plus one ex-big league regular in Larry Chappell) did succumb to the disease.

In World War II baseball was famously given the “green light” to continue operating by President Franklin Roosevelt who said, in answer to a letter by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, that he felt, “It would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” noting that the war effort would have everybody not in the military working “longer hours and harder than ever before” and that they ought to not therefore be deprived of recreation opportunities, arguing that “if 300 teams (including minor league outfits) use 5,000-6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens — and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.”

Roosevelt didn’t have to deal with public health fallout from letting baseball play on. His considerations were those of morale in the face of an external crisis, something baseball (or football, which also played on) was good ballast for.

That’s what makes this modern moment so disconcerting. Many of us lean on sports for a sort of emotional support when the iron’s in the fire. Following along with these low-stakesyet-high-stakes written in points, goals, touchdowns and home runs allow us to vent our enthusiasms and anxieties in a way that’s not too existentially harrowing.

Sports not being here lets us know exactly how far away from home we really are.

Having covered the local beat for approaching two years now, I know I don’t have to do a hard sell on the “sports are good, actually” theme for Valley folks. The giant herd of roaming Calexico Bulldogs that occupied arenas all over the county and beyond as their boys’ basketball team won its first-ever CIF sectional title was just the latest in a long series of reminders that we’re on the same page.

So what do we do now? It’s hard to say. It doesn’t seem like there’s much to do but wait and hope the sun does, in fact, come out tomorrow (and not in the dagger-wielding way the Valley’s version of the sun likes to do).

That might not seem like much, but we don’t have our usual shoulder to cry on, so chin-up is the best way to tackle this thing. I only hope that we can navigate our way out of this thing before it’s too late for some of our terrific area spring-season seniors to get a proper sendoff.