Feature image from @TheTournament

It’s been 122 days since a team wearing “Purdue” on the front of their jerseys played basketball.

I’ll bet you barely remember that the Boilermakers lost in overtime to a Rutgers team that ended up breaking the 20-win mark for the season. (You will remember Geo Baker’s name, because just like Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman and Corey Sanders and Brandon Paul he was a random jabroni that gave Purdue the business.)

I’ll bet you barely remember a time when Matt Haarms entering the transfer portal before Nojel Eastern was a ridiculous proposition. (Also, well, everything else in 2020.)

I’ll bet you barely remember that a Mark Turgeon Maryland team actually won something – a share of the Big Ten regular season title! (To be fair, they tied with Wisconsin and Michigan State, and 1/3 of a title technically rounds down to 0 titles, those are the rules, please don’t tell Maryland fans.)

(Just kidding, there are no Maryland basketball fans, you’re fine.)

Oh yeah, also global society was shut down by a novel coronavirus with over 11.5 million cases and 500,000 deaths worldwide (in the USA: 3 million cases, 131,000 deaths) and over four months of social distancing and then maybe because there were no distractions or because it was so gruesome the murder of George Floyd kickstarted a worldwide movement against police violence (and other mechanisms of systemic oppression) intentionally designed to harm black people and all the reactions/counterreactions spurred by it all and buddy boy.

What a truly insane 122 days it’s been.

God bless all you parents, teachers, grocery store clerks, sanitation workers, delivery workers, bus drivers, nurses and emergency medicine physicians, nursing/assisted living home staff, and everyone fighting everything caused by SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.

If we’re being honest, sports are a small and fairly meaningless part of the giant jigsaw puzzle of society. The responsibilities of all those roles above, plus thousands more, dwarf the little bit of relief that having regularly scheduled sports provide. Objectively, they are roles in society much more important than anything sports-adjacent.

But a lie we often tell ourselves is that “sports are a distraction from real life”.

Sports, no matter how large or small they loom in your life, are undeniably intertwined with real life. School/city pride, ability to work as a team and mentor others, to grow from losses and win with grace (or at least try), a level of racial diversity that is often far beyond society – it’s all traced back to sports.

It’s also why “distraction from real life” is dismissive to everyone who has formed real bonds through sports, who has been changed (even subtly) by sports, who has seen the way dominating sprints in front of a vicious dictator or raising a black-gloved fist on an Olympic medal stand or the many superstars who stepped away from the peak of their sport to take a stand against oppression can change the world.

Dismissive to those black Boilermaker athletes that we all loved to cheer every time they put on a Purdue (or even a Men of Mackey) jersey, who we collectively fail to fight for as vehemently off-the-court as we do while they’re playing.

Dismissive to every Boilermaker athlete or international student or Purdue staff or faculty member expected to return to relatively-normal life as fall semester begins in 6 weeks, even as confirmed COVID-19 cases are on the rise again throughout the country. (Deaths are a lagging indicator – in a month, we’ll know the human life cost of trying to reopen society and abandon masks too quickly.)

Watching the Men of Mackey play basketball in an empty Nationwide Arena, a step towards that desired normal, as if the world hasn’t been changed forever by these last 122 days, just felt…flat. I felt no emotional attachment whatsoever even as Purdue alumni suited up (though fewer than expected), because everything in real life feels so tenuous.

Real people around my family have been harassed by, and even murdered by, law enforcement. That’s not at all to implicate the real people in that profession – the culprit is the system in place that incentives harm to some of the very people that we love to root for on the basketball court or in football pads.

Real people around my family, including vulnerable people loved by us BS’ers, have been diagnosed with and suffered through (and some killed by) COVID-19. That’s not to say all cases have caused suffering or death – but this virus is a real risk, even to those of us who believe we have no “preexisting conditions” that compound its effects. By calling too quickly for a restart to sports, returning a sense of normalcy to our lives, we might put in place another system that incentives harm to some of the very people that we love to root for on the basketball court or in football pads.

It was really hard to invest emotionally as the Men Of Mackey played in an empty arena, because both our leaders and all of us in the greater public haven’t done enough to solve any of the emergencies looming over our real lives.

By the time actual Purdue sports returns, I hope we all have done enough to help fix these looming emergencies to again fully emotionally invest in a buzzer-beating three or a trick-play touchdown.

I’m just afraid it’ll be too quick, too soon, with too little of an effort made.

I hope my fears are wrong.

Here are some random things:

• Wear a mask and wash your hands when you’re (rarely) out so that we can protect the most vulnerable among us.

• I love the Elam Ending, and if you need an explanation here you go. Playing to a set score, instead of playing to a clock and using intentional fouls to make the end of games unwatchable for casual fans, is a perfect fix for the sometimes-knuckle-dragging finishes in college basketball. Make it the new normal asap.

• I really miss Jon Octeus. There’s a thing I really want to write about him, and I’m sure I eventually will, because I miss writing and talking nonsense with you BS readers/listeners.

• I did not miss a certain color announcer that worked Saturday’s win against Heartfire. Even Fran Fraschilla, who was working today’s loss to Boeheim’s Army, was off on a tangent during the Elam Ending talking about Ja Morant being the NBA’s version of Patrick Mahomes and…I dunno man, we haven’t had sports for over four months can we just talk about the live sports right in front of you?

• Black Lives Matter.