Saturday, October 10, 2020

The maybe season

 Perhaps it's time now to just throw up our hands and hang a title on this puppy. If we can actually define what the puppy is, of course.

The Blob's suggested title: "Subject To Change."

Subtitle, "Everything That's Happening For the Forseeable Future, If In Fact The Future Is At All Forseeable Anymore."

Seems to me this would cram the landscape of Sportsball World into a neat one-size-fits-all box, and neatness is something to be craved in these shirttail-out days. It would cover the high school football games being postponed or canceled or hastily scheduled at the last second because of various Bastard Plague outbreaks. It would cover the spiraling mess upon whose edge the NFL is teetering right now. And it would cover all the other various headaches various other schedule-makers are up against.

Let's take the ECHL, for instance.

Right now the plan, if it can be called that, is for 13 teams to begin play Dec. 14. Another 12, including our very own Fort Wayne Komets, are looking at a Jan. 15 start. This means, theoretically, half the league will play a 72-game schedule, and the other half will play a 62-game schedule.

The regular season, theoretically again, would end on June 6.

June 6. 

Which means we're faced with the utterly insane possibility that we could all be going to a Komets playoff game on the Fourth of July.

I suppose that's no more bizarre than watching the Tampa Bay Lightning hoisting the Stanley Cup on  Sept. 28 -- or half the ECHL playing 10 more games than the other half, for that matter. But it seems so, especially when you say it out loud and all.

The worst part of this, of course, is it might not happen this way at all. Everything is contingent on the Plague and the edicts of the various health departments. Those vary from one community to another, which accounts for the weird two-seasons-in-one scenario.

This means the Komets might begin play on Jan. 15, or they might not. Ditto all the other teams in the league. So the current schedule, on top of everything else, is completely tentative at this point. 

And if you think that makes you grab your aching head and beg it to stop, imagine if you're, say, Michael or David Franke. I bet they're having a lovely time right now.

Man. Has normal ever looked so un-boring?

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