A bit of the normal. Sort of.

They were playing football again Saturday, out there at West Point. The sun shone, on this first weekend in September. The Black Knights of the Hudson were moving the football. There were even a few of the Corps in the stands, judiciously spaced, dressed in desert camo khaki.

Down on the field, the ball was snapped. The quarterback wheeled. He extended the ball, pulled it back, the Army option, its same old rhythms, the same old clash of bodies at the point of attack.

I went to a sports bar to watch this.

I wore a mask. The bartender drawing me a beer wore a mask. I sat alone, raising a fist when the QB plowed over the right side for six, pretending it was just another college football Saturday.

It was not, of course. It is not going to be this fall -- if in fact there is a college football fall by the time October comes and the Bastard Plague has put half of everyone's roster in quarantine.

Maybe that happens. Maybe it won't. Opinions varym to quote Patrick Swayze in "Roadhouse."

The Blob's opinion is they shouldn't be playing, and that all this Play Football And Let The Coronavirus Sort 'Em Out is nothing but greed talking. Athletic departments need the money, so send the employees back to work. And make it sound like we're doing it for the players who, being players, desperately want to play.

However.

However, this does not mean I don't miss it fiercely.

This does not mean I don't want to go to a sports bar on a Saturday afternoon in September and watch who ever is on, Army-Middle Tennessee State or Marshall-Eastern Kentucky or Whatsammatta U.-Directional Hyphen Tech. For me, Saturday, it was mostly the Army game, because to me the service academies represent what college football used to be before it became Alabama/Clemson Inc.

Actual students actually playing for their schools, first-round draft picks or not. Imagine that.

Point is, it was September and it was college football, two of my favorite things. So I watched. And I guess that probably makes me greedy, too, because while I was watching I didn't really care if any of those kids breathing on one another for three hours wound up getting this nasty-ass disease. I was just happy to be watching college football again.

I was just happy for a bit of the normal, or what passes for it these days. God help me.