Virtual-ness 1. Reality 0.

So I see Lando Norris won the virtual IndyCar race Saturday at virtual Circuit of the Americas in Texas, and this made me smile. That's because it was something that could never have made me smile in the time before the Bastard Plague, on account of it could never have happened.

Lando Norris, you see, is not an IndyCar driver. He's the 20-year-old wunderkind who wheels one of McLaren's Formula One entries in that other world, the one the Bastard Plague has put on hold.

Yesterday he drove a virtual Arrow McLaren Indy car to virtual victory, beating back a challenge from Arrow McLaren "teammate" Patricio O'Ward in the final laps.  Needless to say, this would never have happened in what we now wistfully call Real Life, because Indy drivers and F1 drivers never mix it up for a variety of reasons -- most of them contractual.

And that is a shame.

That is a shame because the Indianapolis 500 was never better or more intriguing than when the F1 boys used to jump the pond in May. You had A.J. and Mario and the Unsers, all the usual characters, but you also had Jim Clark and Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart and Jochen Rindt and Denis Hulme  -- and of course Dan Gurney, who had a foot in both worlds.

It made the 500 what it truly never has been since, an international event. Until Fernando Alonso showed up for McLaren a couple of years ago, a full-time, marquee F1 driver hadn't answered the green on Memorial Day weekend in Indy since Clay Regazzoni in 1977. And even though Nigel Mansell and Emerson Fittipaldi ran IndyCar after their F1 days -- and even though IndyCar is a veritable United Nations now -- it has never quite been the same.

So hooray for virtual-ness, in this case. And that's coming from someone who, right this second, is looking at the bookshelf just off my left elbow.

On it are an old Indianapolis 500 commemorative glass and a couple of prints of iconic Indy 500 cars, and two photographs. Both are from 1965.

One is an action shot of a green-and-yellow Lotus-Ford, No. 82, cruising through one of the Speedway's corners. And the other?

The other catches the driver of that Lotus, Jim Clark, grinning in the cockpit the day after winning the '65 500. Kneeling alongside him is Lotus designer Colin Chapman, matching Clark grin-for-grin, one hand clutching the rollbar.

As you can probably guess, Jimmy Clark is an alltime favorite of mine. He was also a two-time F1 champion who won 25 Grand Prix before dying in a Formula Two race at Hockenheim, Germany, in 1968. I keep those two photographs on the bookshelf to remember him, and also to remember a golden, far too brief moment in time at Indianapolis.

Lando Norris kind of brought that time back yesterday. So here's to him.

And here's to Virtual-ness 1, Reality 0.