Friday, November 13, 2020

Viral ongoing-ness

You remember what they said, right? The Q-Crazies, the Kool-Aid drinkers, the Trump Navy and its mobile infantry in their weirdly ISIS-looking pickup trucks?

They said the Bastard Plague would vanish like a whorl of smoke on Nov. 4 if Joe Biden beat their boy in the election.

They said it was just a lot of politically-driven nonsense, that almost a quarter of a million Americans weren't dead because of it, that it was completely under control because, by golly, their boy said so.

Well. It's Nov. 13, and Joe Biden is the president-elect, no matter what delusions the Mad King is currently entertaining. And you know what?

The  Bastard Plague is still with us.

And now it's coming for college basketball.

The season hasn't even begun, and already Tom Izzo has shown red for the Plague, and Seton Hall and Connecticut have both halted men's basketball activities because of it, and the Ivy League, always the radical in these matters, has already canceled its winter sports. Covid-19 cases are soaring all over the country again -- most notably right here in good old Indiana -- and hospital capacities are reaching critical mass again, and isn't it amazing how it's just disappeared?

Right. If this is disappearing, a guy standing naked on a street corner in Times Square is utterly invisible.

Truth is, this is going to get worse again before it gets better, just like the people who actually know what they're talking about said it would once the weather starting getting cold and chased everyone inside. Which means empty football stadiums are going to give way to empty gyms and arenas, and the weirdness will continue to attend our favorite games.

We all hoped it would just magically go away with the turning of the calendar to a new year (or with an election, according to the cynics and crazies.) But no dice. The college basketball season  is going to look a lot like the college football season, with the possibility it might look even worse.

More outbreaks. More canceled/postponed games. More home courts stripped of their mystique and their advantage and their red-line decibel counts.

Now there's a real disappearance for ya. 

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