It’s time for sports to get back to normal | Mike Sielski

Saturday marks two weeks since I received my second Pfizer vaccine shot for COVID-19. It marks the beginning of my return to full freedom, to life as I knew it before the pandemic. That life included sports: watching sports, covering sports, enjoying sports. These last 14 months have not included sports, not in the same way.

I want that old life back.

With the exception of three games – two Phillies games at Citizens Bank Park, one Sixers game at the Wells Fargo Center – I have watched sports through the two-dimensional prism of my television screen. I have covered sports with a cold detachment, joining Zoom calls on my laptop for postgame sessions with athletes and coaches, hoping that a team PR rep sees my little digital hand raised, hoping to get a question in. I have not enjoyed sports nearly as much.

I don’t mean to make these laments sound graver than they are. I have family members and friends who have lost family members and friends to the virus. I have friends who have lost jobs because of the lockdown’s economic damage and fallout. The challenges in continuing to carry out my work don’t rank high on the scales of tragedy and hardship that people have endured during the pandemic, and I certainly haven’t been alone among sports media members in having to deal with restrictions on our access to team members, with interviews conducted always at a remove, with stories and columns written from our living rooms.

But I also don’t think I’m alone in my eagerness to get back to how things used to be, or at least as close as possible to the way they used to be, especially now that, throughout our country, our state, and our city and its surrounding suburbs and towns, cases are falling and more people are getting vaccinated and the promise of a full reopening later this month hovers on the horizon. And I also don’t think I’m alone in believing that having sports return to normal would help us, as individuals and as a society, return to normal.

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What does “normal” mean for sports now? It would mean fuller or, eventually, full stadiums. The emptiness at ballparks and arenas has been a constant reminder, even during our leisure time, that the pandemic has been always with us, that the grasp of its tendrils has been inescapable. Watching a game – on television, from a socially distanced press box, whether you paid to be there, whether you are paid to be there – is a diminished exercise for the absence of fans, for the muted sense of excitement, for the absences of atmosphere and community, for the widened distance between each of us.

It would mean allowing young athletes to resume competing fully in organized sports, to give them that outlet, that chance to grow, that chance for them to build pride in themselves and for their neighborhoods to build pride in them.

In New Jersey, officials are estimating a 15% to 20% drop in athletic participation among the state’s high schools this year because of the pandemic. In March, the Lower Merion boys’ basketball team won its first district championship in 25 years, its first since Kobe Bryant was a senior, the kind of achievement and story that bonds a community – when a community is permitted to come together and celebrate it.

In Philadelphia last summer, coaches and athletes lobbied city government to bring back high school sports in the fall, because amid Philadelphia’s epidemic of murder and gun violence, they regarded living without the structure and safety of sports to be more dangerous than living with a higher risk of catching COVID-19. Understanding the value that sports, at its best, can have at those early stages of life: That’s “normal.”

It would mean breaking out of the silos and shells in which we have been trapped, and in which we have trapped ourselves, for so long. It would mean shaking that star player’s hand and looking him in the eye and asking him a direct question before sitting down to tweet a biting one-liner or write a column that’s going to tear him apart. It would mean passing on the street someone of a different race, a different gender, a different political opinion, and reducing those qualities to their proper size, to their relative unimportance, because both of you are wearing kelly green and silver, or red and white, or orange and black.

The shared experiences of standing and singing during the seventh inning, of precariously balancing four cups of beer and half a dozen hot dogs on a paper tray, of booing the Mets or the Nets or the Jets or Gabe Kapler, of bundling up and heading to the local high school football field on a Friday night, of having these traditions be tangible and tactile whether you are participating in or witnessing them: They might seem minor. They are not. They are necessary to our recovering our collective mental and emotional health.

They are how we reestablish and maintain our humanity.

So yes, as of Saturday, I will wear a mask only when and where I must. And I will continue counting the days until there are lines snaking from ticket windows at Citizens Bank Park and the Wells Fargo Center and Lincoln Financial Field and Subaru Park and the Palestra. And I will look forward to meeting Doc Rivers in person for the first time. To having Jake Voracek chew me out in the locker room face-to-face. To playing “Rock, Paper, Scissors” against Nick Sirianni and writing about it.

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To having my chest swell as my 9-year-old son, the smallest kid on the court, battles for a rebound. To shaking my head in wonder, with 20,000 other people, as Joel Embiid makes a Fred Astaire-level spin move so nimble that it ought to be impossible for a 7-foot-tall man to pull off.

To hearing the roars when Bryce Harper connects with a hanging slider and the groans when the Eagles defense gives up an 11-yard catch on third-and-10. I will look forward to all of this and more.

Don’t tell me these things don’t matter. In so many ways, they’re the things that matter most.