Here and there I am seeing suggestions that we should give up any thought of “returning to normal” and instead consider the extent to which we might be able to sustain and extend our current level of sacrifice and privation for the good of all.

The thinking is that what we are now calling “normal” was, after all, a state of gathering crisis headed toward the crash of the world’s ecological systems and the resulting crumbling of what currently passes for “civilization” starting in as soon as a few decades. Mourn but move on, this line of thinking goes, and find ways to continue the current “suffering”—not to avoid the later crash, it now being well too late for that, but to soften the blow.

Weighty considerations would be required in the formulating of a plan along these lines. As helpful as it would be to maintain the currently drastically diminished vehicle emissions, for example, keeping millions of people out of work would not be a sustainable method for doing so.

There are some things, on the other hand, that it would be a pleasure to continue to do without: the spirit-breaking public school system, the necessity of wearing pants to meetings, and, of course, professional sports. Call me a curmudgeon, but one of my favorite things about the current emergency has been the fact that it has forced all professional sports seasons to a halt.

“There’s a way” of allowing the return of large-scale sporting events, the nation’s highest-ranking epidemiologist is supposed to have said on television the other day, before going on to stipulate a partial list of needed restrictions that were already so stringent as to make clear to anyone who was really paying attention that there is virtually no way at all. According to Fauci, players would need to be sequestered for the season in hotels under constant health monitoring and with frequent testing for the virus. As a given, their games would be played only for the television cameras, in otherwise empty stadiums.

Except  the stadiums wouldn’t be empty other than the players and television crews. Fauci either overlooked or failed to mention the many people besides athletes who are needed to put on the show of a major professional sporting event. How many of these people would want to come to work, by what twisted logic could they be designated as “essential,” and how many wrongful death lawsuits emanating from their ranks would league owners be willing to tolerate?

If we do end up having to do without sports for an extended period of time, I hereby propose that we continue trying to do without them even after this emergency is over, if in fact it ever ends. Although my fantasies about life post-virus are mostly pretty bleak, here is one of my fonder imaginings: Even once circumstances change sufficiently that we are once again willing to be in confined spaces with people we don’t already live with, there will come some sort of collective decision that, despite it then being possible to restart professional sports, we would just rather not.

In this fantasy, a new gravity and seriousness will have swept the nation after the wakeup call of this pandemic, and all Americans—including even the athletes themselves—would decide that, whatever nobility and benefit that spectator sports can contain and confer in the abstract, the particular shape that American professional sports had metastasized into by the time this virus reached our shores had become too demeaning and infantilizing to any longer be worthy of the attention of the people of a nation hoping to reestablish and, this time, put to better use its role as a leader among the nations of the world.

Now that’s a future worth hoping for.

* * * * *

Back here in the present, however, there is little sign that such events might come to pass. The president, for whom and for whose family and staff we can be certain there is no shortage of N-95 masks, has announced that he is “tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” and so wants professional sports “reopened”—along with everything else—as soon as possible.

A vast number of Americans are of course in the market for various forms of escapism-by-screen, and many of them have finished Tiger King and would gladly switch over to one or another kind of sporting event. These numbers are driven by the fact that so many Americans are newly unemployed or working from home, with even the latter finding that they have greatly increased amounts of free time as a result of no longer needing to commute, at the very least.

One would hope that, in a time of such novel and widespread peril for our nation, our chief executive would have better things to do than watch television. But apparently he perceives there to be so little on his plate worthy of his attention that he is watching not just the occasional 14-year-old baseball game but so many of them that he has gotten his considerable stomach full of them. One wonders how much TV time New York City’s ER healthcare workers are getting, by contrast.

Much easier to imagine than my idealized vision of a sports-free future is one in which professional athletes have been determined to be “essential” workers and something like Fauci’s plan unfolds after all. I can already hear the peculiar way that the athletes’ sneaker squeaks will echo off of the thousands of empty seats, but certain other components of this vision of the future are less clear. Will the camera operators, towel boys, trainers, and janitors all be wearing space suits? Or will the essentially gladiatorial degree of self-sacrifice we were already demanding of athletes pre-virus also be demanded of these support workers, spacesuits being too inimical to the soothing effect that has always been the point of bread-and-circuses initiatives down through history? If the latter, perhaps Congress will include an allowance for substantial hazard pay in a bailout package intended to “make whole” the owners of these “essential” teams.

I’m no sports fan, but I can’t help thinking about what might be coming down the field.