The unfinished line

Well. That was ... something.

NASCAR gave us real live humans Sunday in real live racin' cars racin' around the Lady in Black -- aka, Darlington Raceway -- and, well, it was refreshing to see, if a trifle cockeyed. Guys ran that weird line you only see at egg-shaped Darlington, rubbing up against the wall and earning what old-timers call the Darlington Stripe. A real live Kevin Harvick held off a real live Alex Bowman to take a real live checkered flag.

It almost looked like Normal Times again. Except ...

"I didn't think it was going to be that different, then we won and it's dead silent out there," Harvick said.

That's because there were no fans. No tailgaters, no Confederate flags, no guys in Harvick or Chase Elliott or Brad Keselowski T-shirts wearing headphones and making pyramids out of Budweiser empties. No kids in plastic racing helmets. No tents, campers, Winnebagos or burning couches (a featured attraction in the Coke lot one Brickyard 400 weekend).

 Not a single living soul occupied a single inch of empty bleacher.  And it gave the place the unavoidable ambience of what passes for the Brickyard these days, or a western ghost town.

Welcome to the Thirsty Gulch 400, folks. If you listen real close, you can hear a saloon door banging in the mournful wind.

No, this was not Normal Times. But give NASCAR its due. If you're going to re-launch your product in these days of plague, this is how you do it.

Teams were limited to 16 members per car, and their names were put on a list at a checkpoint. Everyone who passed through had his temperature checked  and was logged in before he could enter. And everyone on the premises was masked up.

You can't make folks completely safe from the Bastard Plague. But if all possible precautions has a look, this was it.

We can debate forever whether or not all possible precautions are precaution enough at this point, but what you can't debate is that COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. And if you wait until it does, what you're waiting on will no longer be there.

NASCAR starting up now was a gamble, but the alternative was for the entire sport to go under. And it did what it could to minimize the risk. It's what we're all doing these days, except of course for the Crazy People playing GI Joe and entertaining the dark fantasies so eagerly being fed them by America's lunatic fringe.

If there is indeed a right way in these trackless times, NASCAR did it the right way Sunday. It's all you can do when the finish line remains so profoundly unfinished.